How to meet girls. Things every young guy should know.

"Be there, Be awesome, Be gone." the Tao of Steve, incidentally an awesome movie.

Timothy Markus wrote:My friend emailed me a scan of some cards we printed up and handed out at Oktoberfest 25 years ago.  We made 8  or 10 different ones and handed them out all night long.  We really didn't expect any actual dates from it, rather we just did it to amuse ourselves.  We had girls coming up to us all night long, having searched the whole arena for us to meet us or collect the set.  It was a fantastic way to start a conversation.  At the bottom there's a pic of 3 that another friend came across recently.

I'll also put myself out there and give you a link to my OKCupid profile, though you have to have an account to see it.  As has been suggested, I fleshed it out quite a bit.  Many women have commented that most men don't write much.  

OK Cupid profile

I get a lot of responses; too many really.  I had hoped that I'd weed out a lot of women by showing them a little of my crazy, but I get a lot of messages from women who don't seem to have much in common with me.  I have a hard time telling women thanks but no thanks, and it seems the proper internet etiquette is to just ignore those you're not interested in, so I find that aspect of internet dating awkward.

For those without an account, here's the text:

My self-summary

I believe in equality and respect and that there are fundamental rights for human beings, regardless of...

I'm an engineer, in terms of both education and proclivity, with all the good and bad that encompasses. I love learning and can't imagine ever stopping, and I do geek out at times. While I would struggle to pass Kindergarten art, I do appreciate it.

In the spirit of learning, I'm always trying to be a better person. There are some things that don't come easy and I think I'll always have to work on them, but I'm fine with that. I don't think you can ever change someone else and I think it's wrong to try. If they aren't right for you just as they are, you're both better off moving on. I'm not looking for someone to complete me, rather someone who complements me.

I've been an atheist since I was a kid, but I'm thinking of taking up Odinism because eternity is an awfully long time and Valhalla sounds like the most fun you can have in the afterlife.

I may not be ridiculously good looking, but I'm good at looking ridiculous.

I'm 5'6" and have dated women under 5' and over 6', but if that doesn't work for you, no worries.

I loves me some babies, human or otherwise, and I love kids. Turns out I'm the crazy uncle.

I try to stay positive; I don't always manage it, but I think I always bounce back. The one exception is my hair. I'm having a bad hair life.

I think everyone has an incredible talent and that the biggest tragedy is never discovering what it is.

What I'm doing with my life

Learning something new every day.

TALENT
I'm really good at

Being myself and not apologizing for it

Being a dad

Cooking

Renos

Cheese trays, gift boxes, and gift wrapping

Doing the right thing even when nobody would know otherwise

Creative facial hair sculpting

Laughing out loud in public when something strikes me as funny

Sentence fragments

Not taking myself too seriously

Not judging people

I'm also incredibly strong. I can bench-press 1500 lbs, but I don't do it very often as it takes a long time to do 100 reps and the other guys at the gym get mad.


Favorite books, movies, shows, music, and food


I think my favourite book is Good Omens, but second place is probably a hundred-way tie. I read a lot, both fiction and non-fiction, with the emphasis lately on the latter. I probably read a couple of books a week.

I haven't had cable for a very long time, but I do have Netflix; I'm not a Luddite. I can, and do, get sucked in at times, and it's nice to veg out occasionally, but it's not the best use of my time. That could change with the right viewing partner.

I like all six types of music: rhythm & blues, country & western, and hip & hop. Good music spans the spectrum, bad music is whatever I play.

I'm a big fan of food, sustainably grown/raised for preference. Being half Dutch, half British, I have a deep appreciation for the culinary skills of pretty much every other ethnicity. My personal belief is that the eras of British and Dutch colonialism were brought about, not because of the pursuit of imperialism or commerce, but simply to find something palatable to eat. I would love to take some classes in Thai, Moroccan, and Indian cuisine. If you're Thai, Moroccan, or Indian, we should talk.

Six things I could never do without


Tea, in most of it's forms.

Possibly 5 gallon buckets.

I'm not sure what else. I think if I had an adequate supply of tea and buckets, I could improvise anything else I need. If you're looking for gift ideas for me, I'd suggest a 5 gallon bucket full of tea.

I spend a lot of time thinking about

How to solve a problem like Maria.

Cows, pigs, chickens, and shit

Sustainability

Bees and the stupidity of humankind. While I haven't conducted any scientific studies, anecdotally I think it's apparent that intelligence varies inversely with the number of people gathered.

Fermentation

On a typical Friday night I am

Surprised it's Friday.

DATING
You should message me if

If you think my crazy and your crazy have a chance. We're all nuts in our own way and, looking back, I think my best relationships were the ones where her 'annoying' habits were endearing to me. I'd love to find someone who thinks the things about me that drive most people nuts are a positive. I told you I'm an optimist. I'm also looking for someone for whom honesty is important. We're all adults here and if you can't be honest with your partner, you really don't have a partner.

I'm not a patient man, so I would much rather meet for coffee (tea) than email endlessly.

That said, please don't bother if you're racist or homophobic; I really don't want to know you.EDIT

😂 So I'm reading the text on your profile and thinking "hmm this sounds familiar" and realized I'd seen your profile on there! But you're too far away anyway. ANyway, small world.

I agree.  Timothy, that's a great profile.  The Maria problem and the 5-gallon bucket of tea was especially amusing.

It appears that Timothy needs to move to the other end of the continent and down into the states, LOL! You've already got two compliments from single ladies over here (Not counting myself. I'm happily and monogamously married, but your bio did make me laugh!)

Nicole Alderman wrote:It appears that Timothy needs to move to the other end of the continent and down into the states, LOL! You've already got two compliments from single ladies over here (Not counting myself. I'm happily and monogamously married, but your bio did make me laugh!)

Yeah I concur, it was a great bio. I actually prefer the longer more detailed ones. Because let's face it, time is limited and I don't want to spend a lot of time going out on dates only to find that we're incompatible on some level that could have been avoided by a more detailed bio.

Which leads me to my next point - if you've got a singles profile that says something to the effect of "If you want to know, just ask!" - DON'T. 90% of the time women are not going to bother asking. I mean, I'm not gonna go message every guy on there and be like "hey perchance are you interested in homesteading and sustainable living?" Nope.

Put yourself out there. Write up a profile. Get help writing it if you're having a hard time talking about yourself. But having a semi-blank profile makes you seem boring and unoriginal... and if you're looking for hookups that's fine but if you're looking for something a little deeper, you'll want to put out the right bait so you can attract the right woman.

I really like Timothy's profile. It's nothing like mine.

I think when it's being done online, it's important to put a lot of information. I think I put more than Timothy did.

It's important to be brutally honest both in your profile and with yourself, when it comes to what you really want. I stated exactly what type of woman I was interested in and I put in several things that would be disqualifiers.

Because the numbers are so great, when you're online, you can be really picky. If any nice girl came and sat down beside me in the coffee shop and started talking, I would talk to her whether she's 8 or 80. But online, especially on the foreign sites, there are so many interactions that I found it necessary to constantly make snap decisions to not pursue somebody. And it's so easy because it's just done with the click. Too fat, click funny face, click, kids, click tattoo,  extreme religiosity ,too old, too young, sounds angry, almost blank profile, and the list goes on. Click and they are gone. And I'm sure that many of them are very good and decent people, but that's the nature of the situation when the numbers are so high.

I have a few rules for myself that I haven't put it in my profile. I pretty much decided on a maximum age of 30 and a maximum weight of 130 lb. I'm 54. I'm doing this because I can and I'm being honest with myself about what I would like to have.

My mother and my ex-wife and my daughters and almost every other female who I know, has a problem with what I'm up to. My mother called to talk about it . So, the other day, I asked my mother, how long do you think it's been since I cared what you thought? After careful consideration, she finally decided it was about 45 years and she was right. Even my daughter's, I have told them that I love and respect them, but what I choose to do in this area is none of their business. My older daughter questioned me specifically on my criteria. I told her that deep down, many men would prefer an attractive young woman. And because I'm not attached and I haven't destroyed my body or my finances, I'm in a perfect position to seek exactly what I want. No amount of explanation will make them happy with it. And my seeking a new relationship was not designed to make them happy.

If all goes well with the woman that I'm currently involved with, I'm sure that a few heads will turn as we are walking down the street. People will wonder what that 20-something woman is doing with that 40 year old man. Again, I'm 54. And they can wonder, and they can chat amongst themselves and they can snicker.

I wish when I was a teenager, that I had reached the point where I am at today, in just how little stock I put in the opinions of those who want to judge my personal choices.

I've had people tell me that I'm some sort of sociopath, if I don't want to listen to their nattering. But I'm not doing anyone any harm, especially these women that I've met online. I haven't made promises to anyone, except the one that I am going to see, in the Philippines. I'm not seeking a woman who is starving somewhere in a grass hut. I'll leave them for the 80 year old guys who are broke. I've chosen this route because I think I can do better. Part of the reason is that these sites are populated by thousands of men, who don't ever intend to carry through. My profile is quite specific on how quickly I intend to act, once I find someone who is worth pursuing. I also made it clear that I was not looking for a foreign girlfriend, sugar daddy sort of situation. Many of the married guys are just looking for somewhere to vacation and a playmate when they get there.

My profile has now been covered up with a picture, stating that I am currently attached. I let her make the sign, since she was quite eager to announce my change in status. I think it's pretty obvious that this sign was made by a woman. Her way of marking territory. I provided the script. She had planned on just saying Dale is no longer available, but she jumped at the chance to go for this more extreme announcement. :-)

I expect to report on this by the end of the year. There's a good chance that I will spend some of the worst winter months in the Philippines, creating a food forest and some sort of tourist destination. There's a little village with 15 house full of relatives, down near that river, in my second photograph. If all works out, I will be the only provider of employment in that little town that contains her relatives.

The situation with my female relatives is not ideal. I suspect that if I where to make a definite plan to get married after spending a month in the Philippines, they would immediately search for the woman I'm interested in, on Facebook and everywhere else, in an attempt to discredit her in some way. Failing that,, because she's squeaky clean, they might try to discredit me in her eyes. Because of this, it's quite likely that if I do get married, I will make the announcement, but I won't even tell them her name or her age or any other thing that could help them in their search.

Some of you may be aware that I went to Kenya, because of a woman. That did not end well, but only because she is extremely controlling and distrustful, not for any of the litany of horrible reasons that my daughters and ex-wife and others came up with. They had made her out to be a prostitute, a thief and many other negative things that just were not true. Every single thing about her checked out, when I was there. She had the job that she described and the family that she described and every other thing matched. We just couldn't be a couple because I must be master of my own destiny and she must have absolute control, because men are children in her eyes.

I've found that it's generally the men who are telling a bunch of lies, in The Dating Game. So I constructed my profile with complete honesty in mind. The majority in the Philippines are Catholic and I openly announced that I put no stock in anything the church has ever said or done. This trims the field a little bit.... One surprising result, is that I learned that there are many who don't really adhere to much of that, they just go along. I was really surprised to find that there are some young Muslim women in that category, who live on the southern islands. They could be tarred and feathered for talking to me.

Obviously, I wasn't going to try to marry all of these girls and women, but I did offer advice on how to escape several situations that we just don't find here. Some work as a sort of indentured servant, so that they can continue with their education, and some are basically prisoners of their own families. In all cases, I said if they do intend to run, do not tell anyone, not even their closest confidant. Pack important papers and head as far north as possible and immediately contact some authority, was my advice. Then get rid of all things that identify, including any regional accent. I didn't expect those sorts of interactions. I promise the woman that I'm involved with, that I will not contact any of those women again. She's convinced that one of them would lure me away.
.....
So, because of how the girls behaved toward my african friend, and the negative way they have talked about my current situation, I could very well end up married, without them knowing anything about the person I've married, not even her name. And I'm okay with that. The woman in the Philippines keep saying what if your daughters don't allow you to do this and what if your family doesn't allow this or that. She has never met anyone who puts so little stock in the opinions of others. Every one of her friends and relatives has weighed in on what should be done with me, and I have somehow passed the test.

If I do end up married, we will live together in Canada for a few months and then I will invite just about everyone in my family to a wedding in Canada. And I'm absolutely confident that my daughters will show up at that wedding and they'll be fine with it, after they get to know her. And those are the only two people that I really want to be fine with it. My ex-wife has mentioned, that if this should happen, perhaps she could be friends with her. Absolutely not. I don't want to inject poison into the situation!😂😂😂

So I'm going to be a little bit mean here, and I hope that no one takes it the wrong way, but as a 24 year old women who might be the kind of person targeted by men using this thread for advice I feel that I have to add in some of my own input. That is, don't listen to Dale. I'm not making any aspersions on his character as I don't know him, and those that do say he's a good person. But while he had a few good things to say about dating, and most of them were quoted by others on the thread, the rest are better off left where they are. I don't know if this is a generational thing, or regional, but it was more than just the tone of his writing that was off putting.

To be fair, I don't know what he said in the last 2.5 pages of this thread, so I can't comment on that. But the reason I skipped his posts was because reading them was making me uncomfortable by proxy. As a message to any young men who are hoping to find advice on this thread, just, don't emulate him. Please, we see enough of this kind of attitude and we don't need any more of it.

If you're looking for a relationship and not just sex, the best piece of advice I can give you is to be their friend. Don't get put off by "friendzoning", look up the differences between how men and women treat their friendships so there aren't any misunderstandings, and make sure that whoever you're interested in knows that you're open to a relationship if they want that. DO NOT, make the mistake of trying to pressure them into something, or react negatively if they don't want that. If you like them well enough for a relationship, you want to stay friends with them even if they don't want to have sex with you. (Or you should.) That kind of acceptance is so incredibly attractive in the society we have today. Odds are, she'll try to set you up with someone else she knows, plus you get to keep the friend.

The main red flag I saw when reading this thread - mostly from some of the anecdotes people were sharing - and the only reason I was actually motivated enough to actually reply, is this:

Do not hit on people who are at work! Especially customer service. I don't care if they're gorgeous or if they flirt with you every time you come in, don't do it. You don't know this person, or how they behave when they're flirting, for all you know their behavior is just what they're like when they're being friendly. Maybe they're short of money that month and know that flirting gets them better tips, or their boss is a creep who wants that kind of customer service. And when you hit on them in that space, you're doing it from a position of power where they might not feel safe turning you down. They don't know how you'll react if they tell you they're uncomfortable. Making you angry could possible cost them a job. This makes me so angry when I see it because it's such a massive imbalance of power. Even if you do end up going out, getting married for twenty years, and have three kids, it doesn't change the fact that the relationship was built on a foundation where one person could have caused a great deal of harm to the other if they didn't get their way.

And even if you aren't that person to take advantage like that, we don't know that. Every man that hits on us while we're at work, who knows where we spend a great deal of our time, is a potential predator. This kind of behavior is inherently threatening, no matter how you present yourself.

That said, if you absolutely have to ask this person out, leave it open ended. Tell them about some event you're going to, something that tells them about you, and invite them there. Make sure it's permies, so she's not isolated with you, and can bring some friends if she feels unsafe. If she's interested, she'll show up and maybe ask for more details so she can find you. If she's not interested, she doesn't have to tell you flat out. To that end, don't ask for an answer about whether she'll go or not. Put yourself out there and wait for her to meet you in the middle.

Well, that's enough for my rant for now. I hope no one takes it badly, or thinks that I believe that what they're doing is wrong (except the hitting on people at work thing), since apparently it works for them. But that as a young woman, I don't find a lot of this behavior attractive, and neither does anyone I know. The best advice in this thread came from the actual women in it, so it'd be best to pay them the most attention if you're looking for help in this area. (Plus the guy who was talking about dancing. You can learn a lot about someone just from the way he leads in a dance, not just what he talks about.)

So you have no specifics. Come on, there must be something. I'm sure I could find several things that I might have worded differently.

I probably should have made the title a little different. I started out talking about those two fellows in Kenya who had no game, but then I've got into quite a bit about my personal situation. If I were making a thread specific to my own personal situation, I guess my head would be--

---- How to meet women that you are interested in, with the aim of putting up with much less shit than you ever have before.----- That is my goal. There is so much stuff that I have put up with in the past, that I have decided I won't deal with again. And since I've never had any trouble meeting women, it's just about refining the selection process.

Here's my thing, I don't care if I offend the vast majority of people that I'm not interested in, if during that process I find someone totally suitable. And I mean offend them here because they don't like what I'm saying. I don't do anything to offend those that I meet in my travels either around Victoria or the world. My approach in person is much different than my online approach. In person, I'm just chatty and if there are no buying signals, I don't pursue the situation. And I've learned to recognize the buying signals.

I think the vast majority, probably better than 95% of women who might be suitable to me in age, weight, intelligence or whatever, might still be unsuited, simply because they find me repugnant. So it looks like I'm not casting my net into a dating pool 4 billion strong. There may only be a hundred million potential mates out there. Thus, the wide net.

Here's my two cents. The best "pick-up line" I can think of is starting a conversation about her worldview and saying "I understand". But only if you really do. If you don't, say: "I don't understand: can you explain [whatever you didn't understand] some more? I really want to understand what you meant." Keep the conversation going, ask more questions, until you can honestly say "I understand". Then repeat in your own words what you understood and add your own opinions as well. You don't have to agree with her on everything. In fact, I think it's better that you don't agree with everything. Let her know that you have your own opinions as well and are not afraid to say them. Just make sure you hear, understand and respect what she is saying while disagreeing on some things.

The worst thing in my humble opinion is looking like you think too highly of yourself or your looks. Be modest, do not show off your looks or muscles or anything like that. Do take a shower and wear clean clothes. That's about it looks-wise.

What I used to look for in a guy when I was single was a soulmate. A soulmate is someone with whom you have shared values, mutual understanding and respect, and who also challenges you. Romance and spark are sure to follow, if these things match. Maybe not instantly but they will.

However, if you're just looking for a one night stand then I think go ahead and put "hot" pictures of yourself on the internet. You will attract the women who are interested in that sort of thing: a win-win scenario. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

But please do not pretend to be someone's soulmate if you're really just looking for fun. I give these tips because I trust that the young men on this forum are good honest guys.

Disclaimer: I'm a Finn and modesty is might very well be the greatest virtue here. My advice may not be universally applicable

I seem to be the only person in this thread that this thread is actually targeted towards (I'm in college). I thought that this thread would be here, but I searched for "girlfriend," so I didn't find it. I just stumbled across it randomly.

Dale, you've got some good advice, but you aren't reaching the right demographic. If you care, I would suggest making a youtube channel and posting weekly videos of yourself saying the sorts of things in the posts you are making if you want young people to listen to you. They don't have to be scripted or edited, but it would really help to title them so the audience can find them. You've got no competition. Just search "how to get a girlfriend" and have a laugh.

Also, it's important to know that people do appreciate what you're saying and doing. Just remember the number of people that contacted you on that dating app. The only people that seem to be criticizing you are people that don't seem to be getting attention themselves. They have a right to be unhappy, but no right to project their problems onto others.

I like your idea of making jokes to introduce yourself and get a feel for the other person because it gets around issues to do with not trusting strangers or either person being nervous.

As far as making them uncomfortable goes, I hear girls tend to like it when you are honest and straightforward, but don't like it when you disagree with them. I feel like that should make things easy.

Before I went to college, I worked as a subcontractor for the government. After being involved with the government for so long, It's going to be hard for me to figure out how to be honest again.

I like the way you tell stories rather than giving a list of steps because it tells you how to act like a person.

I feel like after I have a rough idea of who the person is, I want to ask specific questions.

If I decide that I like the person, and they still want to follow me around, talking, then what?

Congratulations Dale, on knowing what you want and asking for what you want. I wonder what tiny fraction of the world does that?

I’d like to add two suggestions I haven’t seen yet-

1. Compassion: “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.” The Dalai Lama

This sounds squishy, but it’s gritty stuff. It means recognizing very deeply that women are people, with their own goals, flaws, and hurts. Think carefully about what it might be like to be her- and not just the great part, where a pair of gazongas come factory installed.

The rules of life are slightly different for her than for you. Some things come easier - maybe she doesn’t realize how hard it is to walk up and talk to a stranger because strangers are constantly trying to get her attention. Some things are harder- maybe you don’t realize that those double-D’s cause vicious headaches if you can’t afford to replace your bra often enough.

This is HARD, and hard not to take personally. What reasons that have nothing to do with you might make a person not want to talk to you? Maybe she just came from the dentist? Maybe she’d rather talk to that other guy at the gym even though you’re way better looking, because he’s her trainer and she’s paying him by the hour?

2. Luke Skywalker vs. Han Solo: Star Wars was written by a man. If you want to understand women, read more books written by women. (Or consume more of your favorite media as made by, not just starring, women.)

“...I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say these were all written by men.” Jane Austen, Persuasion

If you’re on this site, you like to learn about stuff you don’t understand. If you don’t understand how to put yourself in women’s shoes, fiction is a good way to do this. Read books written by women, not just about or ‘for’ them. Books written *by* women have a variety of different perspectives from male authors and from each other. Read widely. Don’t assume Ayn Rand, Jane Austen, or Louis McMaster Bujold have the last word on LadyThoughts.  

Oh, and Dale, have you read this one?

Casie Becker wrote:One of the big lessons on dating I picked up from my mom (who's outlived two happy marriages) was to pay attention to how a man treated everyone else, not just that girl he has his eye on. I've never regretted any man I've dated.  I think that is spot on advice to extend a helpful attitude beyond the pretty girls.

100%, one of the worst dates I ever had was with a man who insisted on paying the whole bill at a nice restaurant but then didn't leave a tip. Reason was, "he couldn't afford it right now". I would have been perfectly happy going Dutch with a reasonable tip, eating somewhere cheaper, or eating microwave mac & cheese at his place and watching some TV (this was college after all) but to be seen in public with a guy who ripped off the waitstaff was embarrassing beyond words. Ended up marrying a man who made me microwave pasta at his place while we "Netflixed and chilled". If you don't have a lot of cash to throw around that's fine, but don't take advantage of other people who are in the same position! In much of Canada and the US, the waitstaff has to tip out to the bar and kitchen, and there's also an assumed percentage of tips for income tax, and neither of these things are typically adjusted to how much you actually get, so if you stiff them they have to hope to make it up on another table. This is to say nothing for customers who throw temper tantrums or are generally just snotty. Again, nobody wants to be seen in public with somebody who acts like that.

I had no idea a thread like this existed on Permies.

Dale started this, and in a posting said he was 53.  I'm 58.  Someone else put up pictures at various percent body fat levels, I am higher than I should be, but working on the farm is helping as there is a lot of walking (on a 7% grade) to be done.

I knew that girls existed, but never really got interested until many people my age had already been dating for a year or two.  And even then, I was mostly hopeless.

Carry a charging battery?    I was philosophically like the guy hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, except that I was in the library studying nuclear physics in grade 5 (11 years old).  There were no girls studying nuclear physics.  I ended up in a branch of engineering that has few people, and even fewer girls.  For sports, I got into association football (soccer), but in Canada (on the prairies) there were seldom girls at soccer.  Finding employment was always a terrible problem, but my nuclear physics did pay off (I worked at a research reactor for a time).  I like to help people, and I did a lot of volunteering (athletic first aid), even for a women's soccer team.  Nobody seemed interested in me.  Getting older, I picked up some injuries (two MCL sprains were the start), which led to a lot of weightlifting and eventually teaching weighlifting at YMCA's for almost 10 years (volunteer).  Still no women seemed interested.

Approaching my 41st birthday, Slashdot (News for Nerds) had a thread commenting on a Wired article about the incidence of severe autism in children in Silicon Valley.  Some of the comments hit so close to home.  Now there was a reason behind so many things which happened.  In the context of this thread, of course I never had any clue about signals from women, I was predisposed to being horrible at reading people because of autism.

I've been on Internet dating sites a long time.  I have no doubt it works for neurotypicals, I don't think any of them work for people on the autistic spectrum.

And living on the farm isn't going to mean there are any girls coming by who I might notice.  So, I will probably end up getting a dog at some point.

To go back to the percent body fat images, Some people live in the "tails" of probability distributions.  Not many kids teach themselves to cook at age 5, or start studying nuclear physics at age 11.  I think at one point I had 29 inch thighs (Kurt Harnett the cyclist had 34 inch thighs).  I am built like a brick shithouse with a bit of fat between the muscle and the skin.  This year I had to lift and carry a 32 foot double 2x8 as I am rebuilding the deck.  Being strong is sometimes useful.

I thought this was helpful for both men and women (especially us introverts):

I can tell you online dating is horrible.

Us singles introverts or very removed from cities , might try them as last ditch option, but I find it discourages more than success rates.

I am back in Canada after spending 2 months in the Philippines. It was the best two months of my life. Everything went very well with Nova, who is the reason I went there. She is someone so pleasant that people who have known her for one minute are quite fond of her. We decided after a few days that we were definitely getting married.

We visited her home Village and several other places. We did some traveling looking for land. About 1 month into my visit, I came to, a realization. I don't need to live in Canada anymore. I enjoyed the mild tropical weather that Island life affords and Nova was very apprehensive about moving so far from her home. So we started looking for somewhere to live. I will build a home and motel, and we will attempt to earn our living there, and only returned to Canada for visits. We will still work on getting her citizenship here and getting me citizenship there..

There are many nice pieces of land available for less than $20,000. The minimum acreage we are seeking is 5 hectares. I'm leaning toward a parcel that would cost me $12,000 Canadian for 10 hectares which is 25 acres. It's pretty Rocky stuff. Good rice land is much more expensive.

I was inside a nice house that cost about $3,000 to build. And that's how I came up with my figure of $10,000 since I'd like something more elaborate.

So, that's how online dating has worked out for me. This Thread started out talking about pick up lines and such. I didn't really use those. I just told the exact truth about what I was looking for and I have done much better than I could have imagined.

As I mentioned earlier, many women were not happy with my decision to go abroad in search of a wife. They said some nasty shit about me. And luckily for them, I will never again enter the North American dating pool. Sometime within the next year or two, you will see a thread about the building of my home and motel. It's  not going to be one of those big giant motels that Rivals the Hilton. It's going to be something pretty simple, and I will use the farm and surrounding land as the draw.

I've always wanted to have a tropical Paradise to call home. It was just a back of my mind desire, not too long ago. Soon, it will be where I live and what I do.

My friend Ray, was questioning me about my plans and motivations, so I told him this.

In order to be truly happy, all a man needs, is a nice home on a beautiful tropical island, and a beautiful young woman to share it with. :-) I was having fun with him, but I do stand by that statement. I am very happy about how things have unfolded. I'm sure there's a thousand other ways to be truly happy, but I think this one, is the one for me. And I know that Nova is the one for me. My stock has gone way up. Every day that I was with her, I reminded her of just how happy she has made me. She was a little worried at first that I would be interested in the many other women who showed interest in me. But once we visited her home Village and started seriously looking to buy a place to live, those worries evaporated.

I live at my job sites, here in Victoria. It is currently about 5 degrees below freezing. My water was frozen when I woke up this morning. I am writing this from the comfort of my car where I sleep. I am absolutely comfortable, because this is the most comfortable car seat ever made and it reclines all the way back. I have really good cold weather gear. So I'm toasty warm. But in five minutes I will stop writing this and I will have to get up to work in a house that has no heat. Whenever this sort of thing happens, I remind myself that in a few months I'm headed back to the Philippines to make a deal on the land that will be my new home. Last week the low temperature was 21 Celsius and the high was 28. That translates to 72 Fahrenheit as the  low and 84 fahrenheit as a high. I can live with that.

We did a Google search and looked at the record low temperatures in the city of Cebu and on a couple of islands we visited. We're pretty sure that the lowest outdoor temperature Nova has ever experienced was about 68 degrees Fahrenheit. And the highest temperature, somewhere in the 90s. It doesn't get Las Vegas Hot there. So then I told her about the time I experienced 35 below zero, and another time when I was in the Badlands of South Dakota and it was 114 degrees. She made me agree that our first visit to Canada would be in the summer. :-)

Like all other people, you meet women by living your life and being yourself. If you're looking for a partner, get out there and don't focus on finding a partner. Enter the broader human community and focus on loving yourself, developing your passions, and being about the things you love because you love them. You will meet people who you have things in common with, and if this isn't happening, don't worry. Consider what other things you'd like to do or learn. Take a class that interests you, volunteer somewhere you think is doing good work, or go draw in the park. Be humble, and develop an ability to empathize with all people, regardless of if or what you want from them. Ask people questions about themselves, and take an interest in learning from others, not just about them.

If you're a man, be aware of the power dynamics in a given situation and the social privileges inherent in your gender identify. Don't abuse those things. This doesn't mean you can't express a masculine identity if you enjoy that. If and when that expression comes at the expense of another persons health or feeling of safety, however, you need to re-evaluate that behavior.

Finally, if you aren't looking for a partner, but just want to have a good time with someone, that's ok too. Be confident in yourself, be casual, and be ok just having a lovely conversation and a drink with someone you met at the bar. Don't get black-out drunk or too drunk to make good decisions if you want things to go further than a conversation. Know your limits, be safe, and listen to the other person.

Yikes. This thread is full of (a word what the young people now frequently use).... cringe.

Dale Hodgins wrote:
Does anyone else have ideas to help a fellow out. I've always found that sitting in a prominent place, looking handsome, can work. But what about those who need some help. Does anyone have some tips for them.

Sure do.   It's very old advice.  What they taught to boys before feminism taught them to be girls.

I do not take your use of the word "game" to mean the pick-up artist's viewpoint: that we should use deception and bad faith to get unfulfilling sex from women who have low self-esteem, drink booze, and otherwise lead you to the gutter.

I take the use of the word to mean that as a man you offer just about any woman on earth a secure home to raise children in.  Historically, that's what men have done for oh - about 2.5 million years of evolution and still do today in the vast majority of the world.  Do not model your behavior after television, hollywood, mass media, anything except what has worked for millenia and has only been abandoned in the most recent times and in the richest countries with the most pampered, lazy, narcissistic women.

Work hard.  Establish yourself in a trade or occupation that both meets your inclinations and is well compensated.   This requires long term planning and committment.  Instead of learning clever "lines" to deploy at dates you learn calculus or anatomy or welding or construction, etc.  These are things that take many years to master.  Just forget about women and marriage until you are deep into your life plan for success.

Women have peak sexual market value when they are young.  For men, it is when they are older.  Young women are enthralled with older men for good reasons.  I didn't care when I was growing up, it made good sense to me.  The older guy with the Camero picked up the homecoming queen every day in high school.  That's actually great news because it just means you go ahead and get the job, your own place, gain maturity and stature - and soon enough you are picking up the homecoming queen after school!  

This is old school game, but it is still lacking.  Let's talk about sex appeal.  

Don't drink alcohol.  Don't smoke.  Don't gamble.  In my experience, worldwide, this has proved to be a combination so deadly for me that it is hard to fathom.  I travelled internationally for many years and the first question out of women's mouths and out of parents' mouths who had daughters...  are you married.

But after it was established that I was single, the faces would zero in with increasing seriousness.  Do you drink?   Not a drop.  Not in liquid form, not in candy, not in cooking - a zero tolerance policy.  This answer always draws a look of incredulity, a sudden desperation in some places around Asia or the former Soviet Union - anywhere alcohol is a big problem.  

When followed up with no smoking and no gambling, they are generally trying to marry me the same day - hot teens, not old hags.  I tell them I am married now, and they tell me they don't care.  Where is your wife, she is not here now: I am here for you right now.  

I dress in t-shirt and jeans.  Worn out running shoes or hiking boots, steel toe work boots.  Unless I am testifying as an expert witness in court, I have to dress in a monkey suit then.  

But I don't have to peacock, as those idiot pick-up artists call it.  It is the years of hard work, of showing up on time and finishing on schedule.  Doing high quality work.  Staying healthy, being courteous and diplomatic in your affairs.  I find great advice in Proverbs, an Old Testament chapter in the Bible. Read them.  I am not a religious person.  Those are just the collected wisdom across the span of many millenia and recorded by Solomon in his time.  

If you are a man that can support a family and don't drink, smoke, or gamble, I'd say you are out in front of 90% of men worldwide.  And it's just crazy to me.  The men ask.  I tell them.  I explain what kind of affect it has on women.  Women have social circles.  You meet anyone from her circle that learns you are a once-in-a-lifetime deal like this and they are running to grab her.  RUNNING.

And the guys for the most part reject it out of hand.  Not drink?  Are you retarded?   Work long hours for years?   What about Las Vegas now?  It's only $300 for half an hour with a beautiful prostitute.  They take credit cards.  It will read "Jim's Truck Stop" on the receipt.  You'll get almost two hours of sleep before work on Monday.

I drive a 1991 Toyota truck I bought for $2,400 eleven years ago.  I have changed one alternator in it during that time.  Insurance is $30 a month.  That's why I also own an airplane.  A boat with a 225 horsepower engine.  A dump truck and bulldozer, ATV's and etc.  I was at an auction to buy a band saw mill.  Before it came up, there was a dump truck that had some cosmetic damage from a 966 loader bumping into the front hood.  Nobody was bidding.  Five hundred dollar starting bid.  I drove it home for $500.  That dump truck makes $1,500 in a good day.  As much as a dump truck that costs a hundred thousand dollars.  All I did was learn how to do fiberglass work, on youtube.  I fixed some broken leaf springs and monster U-bolts on the axle.  Maybe another $500 altogether.  

My wife scored a plow truck on Craigslist for $1,000.  The plow alone was worth more than twice that.  But it had a welder-generator on the back of it, a boom, dualies, new tires and chains all around.  It was an estate sale.  The guy died, everything had to go the day of the ad, and I said "no, honey - there is a zero missing.  Ten thousand".  She insisted we go.  I always have cash.  We got there first, and two more trucks pulled in behind us for a shot at that plow truck.  She found our bulldozer too.   Today, a free treadmill that had 29 hours of use.  A couple thousand dollars retail new - WTF?!  

My wife is three decades younger than me.  Stunningly beautiful, of course it is my standard of beauty here.  Not one iota of make-up.  When it is convenient, I have a mistress too.  I find it of great interest that religious sects like Mormons, probably the best known in the USA, with men who do not drink, gamble, or smoke...  men who work really hard starting young and who follow pretty strict adherence to their moral code (kuran, bible, Joseph Smith's divine revelations, etc.)... they have multiple wives too.

I am only speaking up for the not drinking, not smoking, and not gambling parts of their code.  I believe in science, not religion.  But their women really dig that "good boy" thing about them.  Enough so that even multiple wives, or in my case a mistress, are downright acceptable.  Mine flat-out offered me the mistress, stating matter-of-factly that it was reward for my conduct.  My response was that it had to be a trick.  To gain advantage in divorce.  I was alarmed!   But gosh, it turned out having a mistress even younger than my wife was pretty cool, we've had more than one over the years now and they get along great.  It turns out Asia has a long history of first and second wives or else the wife-mistress model the European men of substance followed.  

Dale, my wife is a Filipina.  We live there part time.  We have a house I built there, with my father in law side-by-side carrying hollow block, mixing concrete and pounding nails together, from raw beach to a two-story home with sea wall.  We are building a second home there on an island off Samar soon, funny you should mention fish farming because we have found a perfect site, two of them actually.  Pristine bays, crystal clear water and perfect distance to a fish port for marketing.  But it is competing with a place on Luzon, land owned by the Aeta people, it is what passes for wilderness there.  My wife and I have scoped out both places and it is going to be a close call between them.  I build wilderness cabins/homes and roads to impossible mountain spots in Alaska.  I've already built in the Philippines, my father in law is now a contractor because I turned him into one.  Nice young man, seven years younger than me.

I have a boat up in Alaska and have commercial fished in the Bering Sea.  Published a technical report on Salmon Farming up here for the State Legislature back in the 1980's.   I have put significant resources into both searches, and we are down to final site selection.   Are we going to be building remote homesites for rich guys up this river valley on Luzon, or farming fish off the pristine waters near Samar?  

You have a feminist-saturated view of life that Asian women do not agree with.  They absolutely love being the support unit for their man.  Feminists in the West are the only ones who deride the amazing work women have traditionally done in the home. Especially motherhood.  But anything to do with home production: cleaning, cooking, organizing, shopping, etc. is derided by feminists unless you do it in the market for pay.  Then its okay.  Like being a child care worker or government school teacher instead of taking care of your own children and teaching your own children.  One is "just a maid" and the other is "making something of their lives" as feminists try to inculcate.  

Here is how my wife figures it:  Every hour that she works in the kitchen, or cleaning clothes, or stacking wood the boys skidded home from the forest - this keeps me up on a bulldozer or dump truck, excavator, or doing three-stage least squares simultaneous equations regression analysis on the internet.  I have a PhD in the requisite field.  So she is making $150 an hour cooking one of those incredible meals or doing the laundry.   If she does dishes, I am making money. WE are making money.

If you go back to the Home Economics textbooks of the 1950's that's what they were teaching young women.  You are a team.  The Thai people like to say the man is the front half of the elephant and the woman the back half.  The trunk is no more important than the tail.  So what if their jobs are different.  The whole elephant can move 10,000 pound logs like match sticks.  It does zero without both halves.

If I step down off the 'dozer to do dishes for an hour, what happens to this family?   If I have things lined up exactly right with three machines and three men, we clear $2,400 in a day.  Every man is his own contractor.  One guy mines gravel, one guy transports, one guy builds road.  You are printing money, watching moose cross the road you're building.  Now that's justice.   My wife has to take care of the kids, keep me fed, floor it to the parts store hours away maybe - we're camping at the jobsites, she is just as busy as I am putting in twelve hour days, sometimes longer for me.  

My intellectual work has some strange similarities.  Lawyers like to call me and want a report done yesterday.  It is the same kind of money, but no diesel to buy, no parts, no risk of serious injury or trucks going off cliffs.   Being able to produce numbers quickly, that stand up in court to a Daubert challenge, an expert witness challenge, that takes a tremendous amount of intellectual horsepower and experience under pressure.  

You have crap scattered all over the place with case law, spread sheets, deposition testimony, motions in opposition to this, appeals, dates and times, so much to juggle in the air and...  a sandwich is handed to you.  Your empty coffee cup is taken away.  A crying child is tended to.  Math lessons are reviewed, Daddy usually does that but he is making bank in his underwear on the computer so do not bother daddy...

I had a flash of anger thinking about how you denigrated this kind of work, in reference to your Filipina.  I took it personally.  Forgive me.  I took it as an attack on what my amazing wife does for our family and how I value her at a lot more than $150 an hour or whichever kind of hour we are billing for, machine time or professional hours.

These lawyers, they're filing motions back and forth.  Their experts are flinging $hit at us right down to the filing deadlines at midnight of whatever day expert reports are due.  Exhibits.  It's pretty interesting stuff and a lot of money is at stake.  I have two cases at the moment, one is over $1.2 million and it is in the news for a Federal Court of Appeals ruling my client's lawyer won.

So you seem to be the kind of guy buying into the feminist theory a man should make his own sandwich, one that is not half as good as his wife can make, wash his own coffee cup, etc.   I will pee in the cup if we have fifteen minutes left before deadline and those a$$holes on the other side just submitted three new spreadsheets of math, purposefully obfuscating everything, land mines everywhere you look...and my wife will happily carry my cup of pee to the toilet downstairs.

You can make that sound horrible, right?  The perfect kind of stuff for a documentary on evil old white guys preying on innocent foreign victims, made to carry their pee cup.  Held in isolation, in a cabin on the edge of the wilderness, Ted Kazynski Unabomber type.  

I log 14 cords of wood a year to keep her so hot at thirty below zero she has to keep the upstairs windows open in order to sleep.  I am the one who broke his leg in six places and endured two operations, the first with the wound held open while awaiting  titanium parts being flown in from the lower '48.  She was my nurse and bought me a hospital bed on Craigslist to recouperate.  

And you want me to make a sandwich, to tell my wife to sit down, for us to lose $150 an hour at least.  The Thai girl, the Laotian girl, and my Filipina all say take the money, stupid!  They love making sandwiches.  Awesome sandwiches instead of bad sandwiches feminist theory would apparently dictate.  The worst thing you can do in feminist theory is serve a man.  Do something for a man.

No son, you want exactly that kind of woman.  And you work your rear end off for her in return.  According to your comparative advantages, much of which is biologically immutable.  

Let's say the salmon are in.  We can be there and back in a 48 hour blitz, no sleep.  Forty salmon, ten pounds apiece, let's say $7 a pound value even though it is sushi quality salmon, off the charts $ down south.   That's nearly $3,000 in fish minimum, and feminist theory as you are virtue-signalling about would label any work she does as inferior; to make sure the man does her job half the hours and the woman does the man's job half the hours.   That is "equality".  

My job is tying off with climbing gear to a cliff with a big net on a long pole, dipped into the fastest river in Alaska.  I can catch three in the net, too many for me to land sensibly, just crazy when the run is in.  But I have to swing this net up to my wife who is watching kids and bonking the fish on their heads with our fish-bonker at a landing atop a massive rock formation jutting out into the river.  She is perfectly suited to her job, and me for mine.  Feminist theory is plainly stupid in our kind of edge-of-the-wilderness but modern technology lifestyle.  

Loading the salmon up, kids running packs of fillets up to the truck when we're processing them, everybody thrilling in the adventure and profit from it...  So hey, let's make sure to denigrate what the kids are doing here in addition to whatever my wife is doing, right?   Only whatever I am doing has any value under this ridiculous viewpoint feminist society in the West has concocted.  Climbing the trail up the cliffs with this taste sensation, the giant slabs of meat...  no value unless a feminist identifies it as traditionally men's work.  Children's work, women's work - all of it horrible. Demeaning.  Exploitative.

To men, their work (women) is incalculable wealth.  I am the richest man on earth.  What King is treated so? It is feminists, not men, that despise what my wife does for her family.  We LOVE it.  

My wife doesn't know a thing about finance.  She trusts me.  After the mistress thing got going, and she had me pretty well enamored with it, she made an offer for a continuance.  An amount of money.  For her. As her own dough, completely her own decision on what to do with it.  I call it her "getaway money".  We are three years early, as of October we'll be over the top.   Last year, she added the requirement of another life insurance policy.  Great!   It was way cheaper than I thought and again the not smoking, education, and clean living paid off.

I don't have to have a mistress.  It's a whole lotta fun, the mistresses sure love it.  The wife is in charge, everyone is clear on that.  If she pulls the plug, it is over the minute she makes the call.  But she hasn't had to.  Quite the contrary.  She has been a great counsellor to them, and a calming voice for me, to show patience with their youth.  To remember she was 19 when I married her and a bit of a headache at times.  

This is a feminist's nightmare, a PC-incorrect horror show.  Except if I call it polyamory somehow that sanctifies it somewhat, I am given to understand.  But the sex-for-resources/security thing, it's really bad.   And that is why I am so ashamed.  lol.   Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and that is how domestic women view this hottie Filipina of mine.  She, and the millions like her are the deadliest threat to selfish women, ie feminists.  

She is a superstar in our Philippines home among her extended family and neighborhood.  Whereas feminist ideology paints her as either a victim of a fat old lecher, possessing no agency and in desperate need of a feminist mommy, or else she is a gold-digging whore.  Generally the put-down is that she is with you just because of the green card.

Mine is not getting citizenship.  We are not even applying for it.  Instead, I am moving to a free country.  To the Philippines for retirement.  Where I can hire a work crew of grown men for 500 pesos a day and build huge stone buildings if I feel like it.  Farm tilapia.  Build the kinds of places I do here, remote stuff. Back and forth for now, it's ideal.  

Occasionally I like to look at these reverse-engineered "documentaries" where they write a script domestic feminists want to hear about fat old white men and young Asian women.   Wow, how they hate this!   It is just so unfair, it's cheating.  Fat old white men should have no choice but fat old white women.  Ugly women, meaning ones who nag instead of charm.  

I was told how I couldn't find a domestic girl, so I had to resort to a foreigner.  I was exploiting her.  Except she was a whore, exploiting me.   She also does not drink, does not smoke, does not gamble, and before me was a Catholic.  She had never had a boyfriend.  You know that society is super conservative over there in the provinces.  Her sister has seen a guy for 2 years now and they do not even hold hands in permies, lol.  

A fat old guy like me that denied current consumption and saved, who just kept his shoulder to the grindstone and learned carpentry, plumbing, roofing, electrical, masonry, concrete, tile, etc. can build a house for a teen stunner with his own hands and very little money. Her school cohort men drinlk alcohol, smoke, and gamble.  The best job they're going to have is $5 a day.  If he knocks her up, he is going to run away.

I moved in with her family, a scrap-board hut, and started construction the day after I met her parents.  I had a lot of years with beautiful girls throwing themselves at me, and this was the one.  I fell in love at first sight, I was muddy from head to toe from mountain biking with an Enduro up in the mountains on a road that eventually was featured in the TV program called "World's Most Dangerous Roads".  

When I met her, I explained that I understood how she thought.  She wanted to help her family.  I was there to do that job.  But we weren't going to just give them money.  That ruins the cultural imperitive of extended family reciprocity.  In the Philippines, uncles and cousins come help you harvest rice, and you go help build their house or their sea wall/breakwater:  it's a mutual aid society.  

A person who does not work in reciprocity is shunned.  Money is not changing hands, nobody is paid for rice harvesting or construction.  But people keep track.   If it is only one side doing the giving, all kinds of bad things happen.  If you just give them money, you turn them into grifters who manipulate you for money with sick grandmas, caribao that died, and get-rich-quick schemes.  Money laundering occupations like Sari-Sari stores.  The Americano builds the store and buys stock.  When the stock is gone the Americano buys more stock.  The Filipinos are taking the money from sales and pocketing it.  So the store is just taking your money and putting it into their pockets, and they are not making money with a store.  You have taught money laundering, not business.

They are going to spring a bill on you for phone, electric, water, whatever on the day it is going to be shut off.  They are going to blackmail you by saying the power will be shut off if you do not pay.  Nobody else has money, you happen to have money, so it is your obligation.  And you will not be thanked for it because again, it was your obligation.  So every bill henceforward is submitted to you the day before service is shut off.  You will live in constant crisis mode and drama.  I see it with these internet introductions.

I said "wow, no problem.  We'll use candles!"  So we used candles and I said to never do that to me again: to watch me working every day, thinking me a fool, that you planned ahead to spring the bill on me this day.  A person may think it unkind that I sat her mother down at the table one day and explained I was perfectly happy to leave her daughter under certain conditions.  My dealbreakers.  

I met my wife in person, and went as soon as practical to meet her mother and father, her sisters and brothers.  Grandma and grandpa, both sides, her school mates and work cohorts, neighbors, teachers, etc. That is how you get to know a girl quickly, not going out for drinks but going to her house.  You want a good pick-up line?  "Let's go meet your family".  "No, I am not going to sleep in a hotel, I am sleeping at your house - am I too good for your people or what?"

They were squatting on land that, incredibly, is on a geologic uplift.  One tectonic plate is forcing their tectonic plate upward.  The land has risen about four feet since my father-in-law was a boy.  What was underwater in his youth is dry ground now.  So they claimed it.  On the first morning I was there, I started rolling trucks with hollow block in.

A truckload of block costs about what a night in a hotel costs.  I was staying with them in their shack.  They were horrified at first, thinking an Americano would never stoop to living in such poverty.  But her father, me, brothers, and eventually cousins and uncles show up and we have a whole house knocked out in four months for VERY little money.  Just materials, and at the end one electrical contractor that cost a whole $10 a day to hook up our generator tie-in. Backup electric.

That is how we built our house in the Philippines, and we'll stay up to five months there at a time, rent free.  We put a brother through merchant marine school.  Makin' the big bucks now!  Her sister is almost done with nursing school.  Another brother is a welder.  The father is a contractor, not a laborer now.  The day after I left from building the house I contacted an engineering firm at a major construction company and his interview was the next day.  That is how his career got going in contracting.  

But on that first morning, just imagine an Americano showing up, and the trucks are already rolling in.  A crowd of people watched this bizarre sight, an Americano working.  Carrying seven hollow block at a time, more than any Filipino.  Money grows on trees in America, so why is this guy laboring so hard?   I don't think they ever got it.  But her family sure has!

I had studied Filipino culture before I met my wife. I have published some things and been on a national radio program in the States.  Back when ISIS took over Marawi City.  I always did that before I travelled anywhere.  Learned their history, culture, and a little of the language.  So I could say "Maayong Buntag" already, count the numbers, etc.   Visayan is related to Spanish and so is Tagolog.  

So I knew this whole thing about extended family reciprocity.  We worked out very specific arrangements.  The brother that went through Merchant Marine school - he paid for the nursing school on his younger sister, and she will help another younger brother.  All of them will support the mom and dad in retirement, a piece of cake with a house already built and everyone having well-paid occupations.

I loved her Dad to death the moment I met him.  It was hard not to, we worked side by side building a house together for months.  He married my wife and I.  Performed the ceremony.  He is also not religious, but a man of moral integrity.  Nice young man, seven years younger than me.  Her mom is a hopeless Catholic but it's pretty harmless, lol.

If you put decades of work into learning trades, if you save money, if you do not blow it on booze and drugs, if you sleep in the back of your truck or in tents instead of needing hotels... then you can walk into a village and have her mom crying tears of joy saying " all because you love my daughter".   Looking back, that had to be pretty overwhelming.  

We have a homesteader lifestyle in rural Alaska, I do contracting work but make sure homeschool is our top priority.  Both our kids were doing algebra and reading at the college level by second grade.  We followed peer-reviewed science literature at the University library, and it all worked.  They were reading by two years old because we started by singing the ABC song every day through mommy's womb the day we learned she was pregnant.  We learned the brain is already developing in the womb, and music is a gateway.

Here again with the kids, I have a nine year old that we have been working with every day for ten years now.  Homeschool is 365 days a year with us, but usually just a couple of hours for each kid.  He can do basic integral calculus.  He can find maxima, minima, and points of inflection in nonlinear multivariate equations.  He does 3D graphing in excel and regression analysis.  I had all those in college.  He would be in 3rd grade right now.

This is what you walk into the gun fight with, gentlemen.  Women react at the genetic level to security, they can't help themselves.  This is millions of years in evolution, not pop psychology.  Security is not just money, it is a whole lot more.  That is why the not drinking, not smoking, not gambling behavior is so sexy to them.  It means wise decisions.  It means planning ahead for illness, death, recessions, etc.  

It means being cool and level-headed, not hot-tempered and violent.  You can fight, but you use your brain.  And choose your battles wisely.  It means children with outstanding educations and work skills, with medical care when they are sick or injured.  

What kind of security do you suppose a girl feels when the morning after you've met her parents, concrete block walls are already going up for your family's house, your house, this would-be fiance' living with your family, eating together, working together, etc?  Someone who knows your country's history better than you do.  Someone who has told you he understands exactly how you feel and is going to give you that?

This is hero-worship level love.  Romeo and Juliet.  And it produces smoke out the ears of anyone indoctrinated with feminism.  This wife is so grateful, and also so certain I will never leave her that I have something I never expected.  In fact, her decision to give me liberties, under her control, follows centuries of development as I learned through study.  I don't do anything without a literature review.  I was an academic, it is how I was trained to approach things. So I studied about mistresses in Asian culture when my wife brought it up.  

So you are in the library reading publications, stuff Anthropologists put together in the late 1800's, I had to learn the whole Muslim thing, the histories of the MNLF, MILF, Abu-Sayyef, and the NPA (communist) too before I went to the Philippines.  I realize people just go on internet introduction sites, look at pictures of girls, write each other and do the fiance visa thing.  I was fascinated by many things, drawn to her culture before I ever met her, this whole extended family zealotry is why I wanted to marry into Filipino culture.

So I learned about "her" in the University library first, and then through a number of trips, I had been to six islands by the time I met her personally.  I had been to Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, and Siberia before the Philippines and all over Asia the most distinctive thing is the lack of feminism.  They ask about it.  Because it is relentlessly in Western media.  But it makes no sense to them so you can't "explain" it. They tell you western women are selfish.   Malicious.  Asian women do not understand their contempt for men.  

Because men are loved in Asia.  They cannot accept the principle that men are bad.  They think it retarded that women would try to be men.  A notable exception is Japan, which by government decree began forcing young women into education and work programs in the 60's.  They have the women's labor participation rate up to 69% now and a crisis is upon them with M/F relations.  Population is actually declining.  Marriage and births down, men on games and porn.  The Asians are leading the sex robot charge too, the Japanese men apparently want them pre-pubescent, so it doesn't look to me like breaking up traditional society is going the right way for them.

So the West has demonized men, insisting Women must protect themselves from ever relying on a man whereas Japan just forced women into the workplace via national manufacturing objectives in electronics, automobiles, and heavy industry like steel.  The young men don't have women and children to work for.  Women are indoctrinated as motherboard assembly drones, not wives and mothers.

With that exception then, Asia is largely what traditional relationships were in America before the 60's.  If you want a homesteader lifestyle your odds are way better with an Asian girl.  My #1 criteria was a girl who made fire every day.  Because I do.  And it changes a LOT about the way you live with chips from wood stove fuel in the living room every day.  Hard labor logging, skidding, sawing, and splitting 14 cords of wood a year.  

If a girl is already gathering wood, making fire, and cleaning up debris every day, it isn't something you need to train her for or that she must "put up with".  It is not a change in her lifestyle.  She grew up with chickens around, so having them in the yard is normal to her.  What changed is having siblings getting college degrees, her father fully employed, having a house with no debt, and a guy who has been quite a teacher for her children.

They're out on an ATV and a dirt bike as we speak, they don't have to leave our property and they have 80 million acres of wilderness surrounding us as a buffer to gangs, drugs, alcohol, crime, etc.   This is security to the right kind of woman, if you are the homesteader type.  Boys on dirt bikes, big old knobbies and smiling ear-to-ear.  Her children are not suffering from war, famine, sickness, or the War on Boys going on in the USA right now.

I'm a big problem for feminists.  Fat, old, and white.  Undeserving of youth and beauty.  Most especially youth and beauty relying on me.  But I assure you it can be traced to my teen years when these decisions about not drinking, smoking, or gambling were first formulating alongside the observation older guys who put years of work in got to have the young babes.

Up to the 1950's this is what traditional American society taught to boys.  Keep your head down and work, learn your trade and eventually present yourself to the right kind of women as per Proverbs in the Bible.  Holy $hit look at me, the athiest, saying so.  That makes me a problem for Christians too, because I think Christianity is just fine, my own kids say they are Christian so we read the Bible at supper and pray together.  I respect their beliefs and there is a lot of good stuff to talk about whether you agree with the Bible or not on any particular point.

So I am interchangeable with a Mormon or something, I guess.  Even though I do not believe.  And Proverbs is always talking about prostitutes, my goodness that seems to be the number one thing boys need to avoid.  But I have no problem with the industry.  The problems are when it is made illegal, same with alcohol prohibition.  I don't drink but prohibition is wrong.  It creates more crime, and worse crimes, than it solves.  Corrupting police and politics.  Skyrocketing murder rates for control over distribution.  

In the 50's was the last time girls really went to finishing schools, or charm schools.  They no longer take the Home Economics track in high schools. Go ahead and make fun of smart shopping, taught academically back then to girls.  Mine knows a treadmill that costs $2,000 new would require over $3,000 in wages to buy.  Social security and income tax, unreimbursed employee expenses.  Transportation, insurance on another car, maintenance - it's going to be over $4K in wages she would have to earn.

He had a deadline.  Moving out of state.  We got it free.  Funny, he didn't seem so happy giving away his $2K machine he had recently bought into our junker pick-up truck.  I probably have more stock than he does, blue chip growth, but I live in a log cabin and he in a large spec home.  This is the difference between working harder and working smarter.

My wife earned the equivalent of an average woman's pay over a month in that one transaction.   I see so many young ladies I know would MUCH rather be at home with their children.  But they work, and explain how they have to because they have to pay for the car, the gas, the insurance, the maintenance, the clothes, and every other thing they need to "work".   Over 40% of their pay goes to taxes:  social securty, income tax, sales and excises, etc.  

Young men and women needed to be trained in what they "wanted".  Children cannot see fifty years into the future.  So adults have to warn them off alcohol, drugs, tobacco, gambling, violence, laziness, etc. and teach by example.  In most of the world, one glance tells you all you need to know about alcohol.  

There are youtube and internet publications heaping scorn on how the 1950's Home Economics books taught girls to treat their man when he came home from work.  They heap scorn upon it, how ludicrous for a woman to have a quiet home for him to return to, a place to relax and be away from stress.  To have hot food ready.  This is ancient wisdom, how you would treat ANYONE who was working all day: man, woman or child. Black, white, brown, red.  Just basic human decency.

It works.  I will risk life and limb for that.  I love doing it.  That makes you a man more than anything else in the world.  To be the ox that can plow, nobody in the family can do that like the man.  Just like the little boy who can be proud about zipping through the terrain faster than mom and dad.  Just like nobody can be the medic like mom.  The cook like mom.  That is what feminism has ruined.  Nobody is special.  Nobody can be the hero in their special thing.  The thing that makes the team work so profitably together.  

What do you say to the wife who cooks?  Everyone heaps praise on her.  What do you say to the boys that finish their wood chores?  Same thing.  The man?  You heap scorn and abuse on him for ten thousand years of "patriarchy", "toxic masculinity", "mansplaining", etc.  Right?  Wrong.  You thank him.  You keep the kids quiet.  You are in panties and a tummy shirt, you weigh under 100 lbs and your hair is down to your butt in length.  I can't help but smack that beautiful fanny when she walks by.  

Your Filipina is culturally programmed to be agreeable, Dale.  This has a couple potential drawbacks.  One is that they pretend to be agreeing when they aren't.  They will endure things they don't want to, in order to appear agreeable.  If it is a person they have social obligation to, like a husband.  A wise man learns how to see through this, the conflicting signals.

But your Western feminist indoctrination is going to hurt you in understanding an Asian girl, Dale.  She steps up to the plate wanting to treat you like a King, and you say "no thanks, I don't want to do that to you".   Like telling the race horse not to run.  Telling the painter to put his brush down.  Telling a man nobody wants to rely upon him for anything.  No unique purpose.  You are telling her she is interchangeable with a man.  

Have her read this.  Ask her if I am wrong about that.  

Well, you're certainly in the running for longest post ever

I was going to quote it but saner heads prevailed.

Fascinating stuff. I'm at work so I just haven't had the opportunity to read it all. I read a little bit and I'm definitely coming back to it later. I sure hope doesn't get edited between now and then. :-)

I read the whole thing. Very little of it applies to my life but I see that it works for some.

 We do not have the extended family. Her family was tossed out by them. When she was young and didn't have food, they would not provide. So we are moving to an island that they can't afford to get to. Only the five in her immediate family who will see any benefit from my being in their country.

My fiance is a very good cook and we had fun competing to see who could make the best fried chicken. That is the only dish where I was declared the winner, but only on two occasions when I got everything just right. We plan to work side-by-side on our farm and another endeavors. When we are building the house, with a bunch of hired help, she has indicated that she would like to be the cook, to keep everything flowing. But when it's just the two of us, she would like to help plant trees and she wants to have a giant garden that includes many spices.

We have talked about the division of labor and who is in charge of what. She tells me that she's in charge of the kitchen, at a certain body part of mine. The mistress thing is a no-go. Most of our phone calls end with her putting her two fingers towards her eyes and then pointing them at me. This means don't be looking at other girls because she's watching.

There's a lot of cultural baggage that doesn't apply to her or to me. I'm an atheist and she is unsure, but it says that the church did nothing for her family when they were the poorest of the poor. So the church won't have anything to do with our lives. It is losing ground at an accelerating rate, particularly in the cities.

I don't have a need to be served for any sort of ego gratification, but she does like to make good food and keeps everything very neat and tidy. I have no doubt that my tools, my receipts and everything else that I normally let get scattered, will be well organized in the future. She has been managing households for employers since she was very young. She's still pretty young at more than 30 years younger than me.

The culture of her home village is seriously broken. Not something I would call culture at all. A collection of drunkards who are raising children. So, we will make our own. Her mother and three siblings don't drink or smoke and none of them have produced children. So we are all starting anew, but it is just the six of us. The entire extended family thing does not exist for Nova. We had several talks about it, and she didn't really come to that realization until we started talking about all of the grasping hands that would be reaching in my direction. And that's why she was very clear that she does not want to live on Mindanao. The relatives who would be a problem for us, cannot afford the ferry to leave Mindanao. She has two grandmothers that she hasn't seen for five years. Because they disagreed with her parents relationship, they decided that Nova and her siblings were nonentities. Now that they know about me, both are making noise through other relatives, that they would like to see some sort of monthly support. Nova said, "let their favorite family support them."

So I'm not really marrying into Filipino culture, whatever that is. I'm not marrying into Catholicism, or Spanish colonialism or alcoholism. And I'm not marrying into many of the more positive aspects of that culture. I'm marrying one girl, from one family, that society abandoned. And together we will be just fine.

We are looking for a fairly large tract of land, to turn into forest. Some of it will be food forest, some of it will be tree plantation and some will be dominated by native species. We are both happy with this arrangement and that's all that matters.
.......
One part of that culture that we will definitely leave behind, is the idea that women need to bleach their skin to appear white. It is rampant. She was unnaturally light when I first arrived, because she had been avoiding the sun, not wanting me to find a lighter girl. After being convinced that I thought this was just nuts, we went swimming and did other things in the sunlight and now she has a nice glow to her skin as shown in the last picture.
.....
Her former employer and a few other people, tried to sabotage our relationship for their own benefit. The employer wanted their unpaid servant back. I arranged to have her Rambo-ed out of that place before meeting her. I even offered to destroy their business, but she declined. Some members of my family think it's totally inappropriate, and some members of her community, think I should marry someone from their family, so they can benefit in some way. So, many people want us to do something different than what we have chosen. It's okay to want things.

Feminism has really been kicked around in this thread. I don't see why there needs to be an enemy. I think it's perfectly acceptable to find whatever mate suits you, and to let the rest of the world do what they want to do. I'm not angry with the women of North America. Many of them are my friends and relatives.

I just found a woman  that I love,  who happens to live further away. I don't think there's anything superior about her culture.  In fact in many ways I find it to be backward and primitive. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer and very little help for those who need it most. Not something I think we need to emulate or aspire to. By marrying me, Nova is escaping what her culture has to offer. And I rejected most things about my own culture long ago. So I completely reject this thousands of years of tradition stuff, that this will have some great bearing on our relationship. Many people don't know much about their own grandparents. I have learned more from YouTube and of the people on this forum, than I ever did from my ancestors.

I often get messages saying that this person or that person has some opinion that I need to know about. She's worried that they might think this or might think bad about her. So I drop in a little reminder. Where can they eat? And she gives me the answer, "at our toilet." It's usually relatives, outside of the five that I intend to help. She's been receiving messages from people who had largely forgotten about her existence.

There's a German term, Schadenfreude that has to do with taking pleasure in the failure or humiliation of others. This emotion is not limited to the Germans. They say one of the main drivers, is jealousy, and that people with low self-esteem experience it much more often and intensely. Nova has had other women that she barely knows, try to undermine her self-esteem, by saying that I will leave her and never come back, and by telling her that I probably have several other women on the string. Even within her family, they like to plot and scheme in the hope of gaining something for themselves, before my inevitable departure. They've known other women who had a foreign husband or boyfriend, who threw their weight around and got really flashy with their newfound wealth. So there seems to be this need to knock anyone who has risen above you in some way, down a few pegs. There's nothing we can do about this behavior, other than avoiding those who do it.

One day we were walking past the squatter camp, near her home, and a lady yelled out, "that rich man will leave you. Are you a prostitute? Why are you walking? Is he so poor that you can't to take a taxi?" A pedal taxi would have only cost $0.20, but it was a nice night so we decided to walk. Schadenfreude.

I rented a house in Cebu for the whole family. Nova's mother and brother are now living there with her. They moved yesterday. The two sisters will join them in June. They have all quit their dead-end jobs and are going back to school.

The squabbling amongst the other landlords had become quite unbearable, so now they can squabble without us. It seemed the main thing they fought about, was how to divvy up the money that I was paying. These arguments were always held in the common area so Nova had to listen to it.

The new landlord does not live in the same building, but he's no prize. He effectively offered Nova's 17 year old sister a job as a prostitute. He offered her a job as his personal assistant and it would pay approximately 25 times more than she currently earns. She has no skills that would make her a good personal assistant. I wonder if his wife knows that he makes these offers. It's common for landlords and other people with some power, to try to put the moves on every female employee or tenant. Even after the job was turned down, he added some load to her phone, and then sent her a text message, saying they could hang out. Her boyfriend was angry about the whole mess and it's a good thing he doesn't live close by. If there's any more of this I will attempt to get his wife's number and I'll make a call. That should put a stop to it.

I hope to have this place for one year or less. The timeline will be determined by Canadian immigration. If we get a Visa sooner, then we will both be earning money in Canada and we will build our home sooner. If it takes more time, then it will be delayed. Normally, there's not much point in scrutinizing and analyzing other people's relationships. But when you work for  immigration, that's part of the job description. I've been told it's a luck of the draw thing. You may get somebody who thinks that this is a wonderful idea and there might be somebody who thinks that someone is being used or duped.

Her mother has already made noise about wanting to go back to the village where she is unwanted. This happened because her sister has tried to get her to tone her voice down, to wear clean clothing and to not embarrass her at every turn. She's also quite reluctant to see a dentist. Many of her teeth are rotted to the gum. Nova is trying to teach her how to use the electric stove and the washing machine. No luck so far. There is no fire pit or other natural place to have a fire in this house, and I made sure that they let her know that she is not to create one. Nova and I are on side with almost everything. I hope that the management of her mother's behavior does not become a stumbling block. I'm not willing to put up with much from her. Once we are on a farm, I will build a small house at a distance, for the mother-in-law. I know she would drive me nuts if she was right there all the time, constantly busy getting nothing done.

Well, the above long post is dangerously close to veering off into MGTOW-land, so for any young men reading this and thinking that "okay, this is what women want" I just want to interject this:

That is what SOME women want. And that is what SOME men want. Some, but not all.

If you want that kind of woman, then go for it! But don't feel like you have to.

I personally get absolutely zero satisfaction from "holding down the fort." In fact, being in that role (and I did it for many years) has a very negative effect on my mental health. I am a driven & ambitious entrepreneur - actually pretty good at making money myself, and if I ever got married again I can tell you I would not consider being a house wife BUT I would consider having a "house husband."

Now - some guys would deride me for that, sure. Maybe I'm a "ball buster" or "not feminine." But that, I think, is rooted in sexism. Why should I have to live a life that is unfulfilling and actually makes me go kind of crazy because of some cultural norm? Because of what's in my pants? I don't accept that. I'm glad to live in a time where I don't have be someone that other people think I should be. I can just be myself.

Not all women are the same.

Now - I don't consider myself a feminist. If anything, I'd love to use the term "humanist" but it means something different, so that's a no go.

So from my perspective, all it is is this - people, any gender, are different. We are often culturally conditioned to veer into one role or another, but the underlying person is always going to be different. So let's just treat people like individuals - HUMAN BEINGS. Let's not talk about ridiculous degrading things like "sexual market value" as if human beings are a commodity to be traded.

Let's just remember that we are people. And some people are going to fall in line with the cultural or historic norms. And some won't. Some will fall in line, but feel obligated to "rebel" anyway, which is in my opinion equally as unhealthy as someone bowing to the cultural expectation even though that isn't really them. (for example, the working wife who really just wants to stay home and take care of her family, I feel that is just unhealthy as a housewife who hates being a housewife and wants something more).

Conversely, I don't feel like any man should feel like he has to be the "big manly provider" if what he really wants to do is stay at home and take care of his family, and have his wife be free to be that breadwinner (assuming that's what she wants as well). And if anyone is reading this and thinking less of any man who would rather stay home and take care of the family instead of being the breadwinner, I would encourage you to consider that as a sexist way of thinking. because if that's the case, what you are basically saying is that "women's work" is inferior and only suited for (inferior) women. Just think about it. We shouldn't be dividing ourselves like that. Neither men nor women are inferior to the other.

Now - all that to say, if I can think of one huge mistake that most young men do, it is to approach women as if they are some sort of "game" that has to be played.

Women are just humans. Find women who have things in common with you, see if you have a connection with them, and then put yourself out there. It's as simple as that. And for the love of God, do not treat us like we are a commodity to be acquired.

Bethany Dutch wrote: Now - all that to say, if I can think of one huge mistake that most young men do, it is to approach women as if they are some sort of "game" that has to be played.

I'm 48.  I think it's fair to say that I've seen as many women 'play' men as I've seen men 'play' women.  There's a lack of understanding from both perspectives and stupid approaches to dealing with the opposite sex from both sides.   What I've seen in this thread is that the majority of the advice is to be your authentic self and try to find someone who appreciates who you are and who 'fits' who you are.  

Bethany Dutch wrote: And for the love of God, do not treat us like we are a commodity to be acquired.

I don't know what you mean by MGTOW.  If you're referring to Dale and his fiancee, my take is that he's trying to bridge a culture gap to find a true partner, in every sense of the word. If you're referring to Robert, yeah, that guy's got a different perspective than most (all?) of the other guys that have posted in this thread.

Lito George wrote:Yikes. This thread is full of (a word what the young people now frequently use).... cringe.

Awesomeness?  Shit?  Dude?  Whatevs?  Frustration?  Ambiguity?

Imma guess most of us aren't 'young people' (I know I'm not), so do you want to elaborate?

It stands for men going their own way. And it's not a pleasant walk in the forest with your buddies. They talk about avoiding women, avoiding commitment, avoiding masturbation, (I assume that's because it might be thinking of women), avoiding marriage and any sort of entanglement with women. Judging from what these fellows have to say, I think that's exactly what they should do. This will save a lot of women from abusive relationships.

I think there probably are certain natural sexual roles that people fall into. It's very important for me to be the provider.  But I don't mind accepting lots of help with that. In many traditional societies, it's very important for the women to be completely in charge of the house and children. I know men here in Canada who have completely given up on managing their own social lives. Their wife tells them that they are going to this person's house or that person's house for supper next week and they are doing something different tomorrow. These guys have learned not to fight that.

Nova is super organized. The kitchen, clothing, paperwork and tools are all organized in a fashion that makes sense to her and to me. This may be a woman thing or it may be just her. Either way she wants to have that job and I am happy to relinquish it.

I remember when I first made my plan to go to the Philippines, some guy told me to make sure to not let her have more than 100 pesos at once and to never let her touch my wallet. I didn't want to lose my stuff, so it was her job to watch everything, including more than 100,000 pesos, my wallet, passport and everything else that I didn't want lost.

Throughout my time there, she constantly told me, "Dale we are spending too much money." She kept pretty close track, knowing that there was a limited amount we could spend. And near the end of my trip, I had to seriously curtail spending. This didn't go unnoticed. She would say, "See, I told you we needed to spend less money before."

She does have some worries about money that are unfounded. "What if your family finds out about you renting a house for my family? I'm worried about what they will think." So I have to constantly remind her that my family have no influence on what I do. This is a foreign concept to her.

Timothy Markus wrote:

Bethany Dutch wrote: Now - all that to say, if I can think of one huge mistake that most young men do, it is to approach women as if they are some sort of "game" that has to be played.

I'm 48.  I think it's fair to say that I've seen as many women 'play' men as I've seen men 'play' women.  There's a lack of understanding from both perspectives and stupid approaches to dealing with the opposite sex from both sides.   What I've seen in this thread is that the majority of the advice is to be your authentic self and try to find someone who appreciates who you are and who 'fits' who you are.  

Bethany Dutch wrote: And for the love of God, do not treat us like we are a commodity to be acquired.

I don't know what you mean by MGTOW.  If you're referring to Dale and his fiancee, my take is that he's trying to bridge a culture gap to find a true partner, in every sense of the word. If you're referring to Robert, yeah, that guy's got a different perspective than most (all?) of the other guys that have posted in this thread.

Yep I agree women do it too! But since this thread is specifically about young men meeting girls, I phrased it for them. And yes, was referring to Robert's comment. I don't get a MGTOW vibe from Dale, although he certainly has a unique approach! But the MGTOW approach is more like a "women exist to meet my needs" approach which is not the vibe I get from Dale at all.

IMO terms like "game" and "luck" and that kind of crap needs to get thrown in the dumpster and burned.

Women are human beings.  Men are human beings.  If a boy doesn't know how to "talk to a girl", it's because he's been taught that "girls are different and require different treatment".  And as such, he's only been taught how to talk to other boys.
This is one of the foundational cultural conditionings of the patriarchy.  Women are NOT men and CANNOT be treated as the same in any form, even in as basic a setting as passing conversation and platonic mingling.

One of my biggest judges of character and emotional/social intelligence (which I would suggest everyone should value near the very top of their list) is if a man can look a woman in the eyes and talk to her like another human being.  

As a woman it's so annoying how the majority of men you meet won't look at you or speak with you.  They "don't know how to talk to girls".  It's dehumanizing.  We're not objects.  We're people.  Just like you are.  Yeah, it sucks that they've been raised to behave that way.  They've been conditioned to think that way.  Even women have been conditioned to not know how to interact with other women.  But at some point we have to hold each other to a higher standard if we want the culture to shift.  And doing so much be kind and compassionate, but also done with consistency.

Jen Fan wrote:IMO terms like "game" and "luck" and that kind of crap needs to get thrown in the dumpster and burned.

I completely agree with you about 'game', but I'm not sure in what context you mean 'luck'.  There is definitely a timing issue, which could be attributed to luck.  I've been turned down by women because they have a boyfriend or because they weren't in the right space or even mood to be asked out, which is all understandable.  The term, and approach I hate most is 'negging' where the guy puts the woman down or ignores her so that she is challenged.  I know it works as I've seen it many times and there are a lot of 'pick-up artists' that teach that method.  

It is very hard to ask a girl/woman out for most guys.  I've known a lot of guys who are far too nervous, even in their 20's, and some of it is acute shyness and social issues.  My own mom was a more than equal partner and I have a hard time understanding how anyone with a mom could think women are lesser, especially since most mothers do far more to raise their kids than dads.  I'm always surprised by racism, still, because I just can't see any meaningful difference just for the sake of a different colour or language, so I'm just naive I guess.  Most of the time I don't have any problems talking to women, but it is different if I think I might be interested in her.  There are some times where I get flummoxed, and it's usually when I realise that I have a very strong attraction to her.  I tend to get to know a woman a little before feeling a strong attraction, so I don't usually have an issue, but sometimes it's an instant realisation and it's a bit overwhelming, which is probably the issue.  I must look like an idiot at those times, but I'm used to that, so I can laugh about it later.  I used to be painfully shy with everyone, not just guys, so it's probably rooted in tha,t too.

I've got a 20 year old daughter and I've been very open with her about guys and even bought her a book called Boys Lie: How not to get Played, when she was 12.  It caused some eye roll, but she did read it and I think it's helped to some degree.  As a teen, I almost always had a very good relationship with my girlfriend's parents, dads included, and it was very nice.  I also had the father of a girl who apparently liked me when I was 13 or 14, pull up in his car when I was talking to a friend and threaten to beat the shit out of me if I went near his daughter.  I got the last laugh there as I just shrugged it off and said "Yeah, no problem." and then kept talking to my friend.  That pissed him off even more because I wasn't interested in her and he was insulted; he was one of the biggest dicks in town.  When my daughter started dating, her mother got her all worked up that I wouldn't like her boyfriend (we were separated and she was trying to alienate me), so my daughter was nervous to tell me.  When I found out, I asked if he could come over for dinner.  He was a great kid and I told her that I'd never dislike a guy just because he was dating her.  I told her that, if I ever didn't like a guy, I'd let her know and she'd know that there was a real reason.  She's dated some great guys and two of them have considered me a father figure because I was always welcoming.  I think that's the best approach.  Mind you, we talk about almost everything and always have, and I've pretty much raised her alone, even when I was with her mom.  If my daughter ever dated a guy I thought was an ass to her, I'd let her know, but she's been very good about weeding those guys out.  We do get a lot of laughs about some of the stupid approaches she has to deal with, so it's not all bad.

I think that many girls develop their standards of what's acceptable in a man, based on their dad. If he drinks and smokes and drugs, they may grow up thinking this is acceptable. Kids from abusive families are more likely to find abusive relationships of their own. So your daughter has been conditioned to expect a certain standard of behavior. A few years ago, my daughter described someone that her friend tried to fix her up with. He had a bunch of kids he wasn't looking after and he had a drinking problem. Her friend thought my daughter could straighten him out. She said, "hard pass. Super hard pass." I think her friend got the message.

I have a young brother who is so averse to being alone, that he's willing to accept a woman from the bottom 1%. Thieving, lying, on hard drugs, just someone on her way to the very bottom. And I don't sugarcoat things. I've asked him, what the hell are you doing, can't you see that this can't work? Can't you see that she's on self destruct? I told him not to bring her around my jobs and I told him not to bring up her name anymore. He's become a full-time babysitter to another adult.

It's really weird with him because he's never had any trouble meeting women. They've all been far beneath my standards, but he travels in drug circles and a big part of it is that it must be a girl who is okay with a lot of the crazy stuff he does, which can include getting into loud disagreements with people in the grocery store, running completely out of money and engaging in violent vendettas. So he's not going to find your average nice girl. But he's never gone this close to the bottom of the barrel before. I'm always happy if he has one who doesn't show up at my job sites screaming. It's a pretty low bar.

Timothy Markus wrote:

Jen Fan wrote:IMO terms like "game" and "luck" and that kind of crap needs to get thrown in the dumpster and burned.

I completely agree with you about 'game', but I'm not sure in what context you mean 'luck'.  There is definitely a timing issue, which could be attributed to luck.  I've been turned down by women because they have a boyfriend or because they weren't in the right space or even mood to be asked out, which is all understandable.  The term, and approach I hate most is 'negging' where the guy puts the woman down or ignores her so that she is challenged.  I know it works as I've seen it many times and there are a lot of 'pick-up artists' that teach that method.  

The popular term "get lucky", usually is a reference to getting laid.  As if it's just 'luck' that a woman decided to have sex with him.  As if she has no independent thought process or rationale.  It's just "luck" that it happened.  It doesn't have anything to do with HIM or his behavior or the impression he gave her.  It's just him being "lucky".
That's what I'm referring to.

Timothy Markus wrote:
It is very hard to ask a girl/woman out for most guys.  I've known a lot of guys who are far too nervous, even in their 20's, and some of it is acute shyness and social issues.  

And it's equally difficult for women to ask men.  I've done it, it sucks!  I'm not talking about asking out here though.  I'm talking about a literal inability to speak with women.  Guys say; "Well... I don't know what to say.".  Well, what would you say if she were a man!  She's just human like you!  Connect with her on a human level, rather than trying to 'figure out' how to communicate with someone who is just as capable of communicating as he is.  

The culture can be subtle and is so common we almost don't notice it happening.  For instance, I stopped to ask for directions once.  I actually knew the guy I was asking from many years back; he's much older, more of a 'teacher' figure.  I'm giving him my full attention, looking him in the eyes, and asking him directly.  He's avoiding eye contact.  My male friend gets out of the car to come join the conversation, doesn't say anything and is hanging in the background.  And what does the gentleman giving directions do?  Turn to my friend, look him directly in the eyes, and tell HIM the directions I asked for.  Which involved lots of hand motion and pointing and physical motion.  My friend was nearly blind and couldn't even see the important hand gestures.  I couldn't see them as the gentleman had turned away from me and totally stopped talking to me.  And it's like... DUDE.  I'm the one that asked you, but you're SO MUCH MORE comfortable talking to a MAN that you can't even answer my question to my face.  
I used to run a business, too.  And men would come in, start talking to my male employee, who would in turn interrupt them to say "she's the one you want to speak with" (pointing at me) and the men would look me up and down and just continue to talk to him.  It was a CHRONIC habitual problem.  

This crap happens daily. It's constant. And it's SO INCREDIBLY REFRESHING when a man actually treats me like a normal human being.

Timothy Markus wrote:My own mom was a more than equal partner and I have a hard time understanding how anyone with a mom could think women are lesser, especially since most mothers do far more to raise their kids than dads.  I'm always surprised by racism, still, because I just can't see any meaningful difference just for the sake of a different colour or language, so I'm just naive I guess.  

I agree.  When you're not actually indoctrinated with the culture, the culture seems strange and non-sensical from the outside.  Funny how that works!

Timothy Markus wrote:When my daughter started dating, her mother got her all worked up that I wouldn't like her boyfriend (we were separated and she was trying to alienate me), so my daughter was nervous to tell me.  When I found out, I asked if he could come over for dinner.  He was a great kid and I told her that I'd never dislike a guy just because he was dating her.  I told her that, if I ever didn't like a guy, I'd let her know and she'd know that there was a real reason.  She's dated some great guys and two of them have considered me a father figure because I was always welcoming.  I think that's the best approach.  Mind you, we talk about almost everything and always have, and I've pretty much raised her alone, even when I was with her mom.  If my daughter ever dated a guy I thought was an ass to her, I'd let her know, but she's been very good about weeding those guys out.  We do get a lot of laughs about some of the stupid approaches she has to deal with, so it's not all bad.

That's awesome to hear :)  As someone who had/has no relationship with their parents due to their own disinterest in their children's lives, it's always cool to hear about proactive parenting!

Casie Becker wrote:One of the big lessons on dating I picked up from my mom (who's outlived two happy marriages) was to pay attention to how a man treated everyone else, not just that girl he has his eye on. I've never regretted any man I've dated.  I think that is spot on advice to extend a helpful attitude beyond the pretty girls.

Absolutely this, and it goes both ways.  One of my major ' tests '  on a first date is seeing how the woman treats waitresses.

Peter Sedesse wrote:One of my major ' tests '  on a first date is seeing how the woman treats waitresses.

Same here.  Act shitty to a wait person or anyone else that you feel has an "inferior" job to yours, and I'm gone.  Then again, if I'm eating with a man and he treats a waitress like shit, I'm not spending time with him either.  Life is too short to spend time with people that are looking down their nose at everyone else.

Trace Oswald wrote:

Peter Sedesse wrote:One of my major ' tests '  on a first date is seeing how the woman treats waitresses.

Same here.  Act shitty to a wait person or anyone else that you feel has an "inferior" job to yours, and I'm gone.  Then again, if I'm eating with a man and he treats a waitress like shit, I'm not spending time with him either.  Life is too short to spend time with people that are looking down their nose at everyone else.

I'm with y'all. I have waited tables, if someone doesn't tip a waitress decently, I am not going to spend much time with them any more. Or the ones who treat wait staff as machines and expect perfection, and get pissy at small problems that get resolved fast. That's a major bad indicator to me. I'd like to put those people in a skirt and heels, give them beer and pizza, on a Friday night in a busy restaurant, and see how long they last. It ain't easy work. And guys who grab at the waitress are especially on my bad list. I have used my heels accidentally on feet. You aren't allowed to kick the customers

You guys are cracking me up! I love this thread.

I'll respond here. First, Dale you are handsome but  when a guy sends me selfies, especially in mirrors or of his guns, I'm turned off Instantly. I wanna learn more and explore your bod later. Unless women are super vain and need a fit hot bod, women truly don't care about your guns.  Until we need to compliment yout o feed your ego, later down the line. ; )

I wanna see how stable, fun, silly and vulnerable you can be. Are you respecting my boundaries? If I'm  belly laughing right away, you have points. I'm a bit intimidating to men because I am independent and strong. Not petite and shy. So not many approach me. I'm working on softening up my gaze. : )

I'm sure I've lost a lot of good men in the past because I looked at the physical first. Now, after dealing with my own insecurities and self observations I know what is important.  Finding someone you can grow with.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask me questions. I'm new here and loving this site.