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Nerds Got Game?
Perhaps those most hurt by a lack of entrenched social conventions are among the least conventional people: nerds. I don’t mean “nerds” as an insult: the most interesting people I know are nerds. I’m one, too. But we lack the social adroitness that comes to others so seemingly effortlessly.
Nerds are very good at games, as long as the rules are made clear. But, for whatever reason – like maybe, lack of clear rules – we’re less skilled at gaming social interactions. Moreover, when it comes to affairs of the heart, many of us are also handicapped by an embarrassingly romantic nature: we’re interested in finding a soulmate, not merely in playing the mating game to “win” (whether measured in number of conquests or in their social status).
The problem is, it’s hard to sort through all the incompatible people out there to find a soulmate unless you’ve mastered a few “winning” mating-game strategies. For a long time, the only winning strategies I knew about were “be thinner” and “dress nicer.” Important strategies, to be sure. But not, strictly speaking, social strategies: they didn’t tell me how to socialize with potential mates, only that I should try to look nice while doing it. By making some effort to appear more conventionally attractive, I could increase the raw total of men attracted to me. But better looks, by themselves, don’t give you a means of picking out the likely candidates from the many duds and creeps who like your looks.
I was a girl without game – without social skills geared toward attracting compatible dates. And, like a lot of guys without game, I was usually lonely.
The moral traditionalists among us – if they recognize the term “game” at all – probably find it repulsive, evoking the worst excesses of the hookup culture and skeezy-looking “pickup artists” like the guy on the right.
But should it be?
Seduction skills can be used to bad ends – you can tell that just by the name. But they don’t have to be. My delightfully square, nerdy husband began researching seduction skills once he met me. Not because he wanted to seduce me in the usual sense, but because he wanted to “seduce” me into marriage – and he really didn’t want to blow his chances. Evidently, it worked.
True, he had to ignore some seduction advice, like “If she won’t sleep with you by the third date, forget about her,” but — as far as I can tell — many “seduction techniques” are simply sensible courtship techniques, spelled out so explicitly that even a nerd couldn’t misunderstand them. Since I discovered, much to my amusement, a few “seduction workbooks” hiding in the corner of a bookshelf once marriage gave me the privilege of rearranging my husband’s stuff, I can report that the advice my husband got from the “seduction community” included such gems as, “Don’t try to kiss a girl on the first date,” and “Refrain from molesting your date or coming off as a sex-starved creep!” Basic advice, yes, but I know some otherwise decent nerd-guys who could have used it.
Slightly less basic advice addressed establishing rapport with a girl, including such handy observations as, “If you’re not at all interested in her as a person, she’ll probably be able to tell.” Again, duh. But hardly creepy. More advanced advice addressed how to juggle multiple women at once, which isn’t as creepy as it might sound at first. If a man is dating several women at once and lets her know about it, that actually takes quite a bit of the pressure off her. For one thing, it’s evidence that she’s avoided allowing an exceptionally creepy man into her personal space: how likely is it that a complete creep could convince not just her but also several other women to date him? It reduces the sexual pressure, too: she knows there are other women he can pester for sex if that’s all he’s really after.
By using these so-called seduction techniques within his moral limits, my husband came awfully close to duplicating the old-fashioned “casual dating without casual sex” script, the very social script whose loss moral traditionalists mourn so keenly. Sometimes tradition pops up in the most surprising places!
Perhaps the popularity of pickup artistry among nerdy guys lies in the fact that it gives them a clear script to follow, even if it’s an imperfect one. As another Ricochetian pointed out — whether you resort to augury or scripted social behavior — it helps to have a face-saving way to break deadlocks while making high-stakes decisions in the face of inadequate information. Since dating often involves making relatively uninformed, yet potentially high-stakes decisions (what if this person you know nearly nothing about really is “the one”?), rather than agonizing about the decisions without getting anywhere, why not simply follow a script? Even if the script prompts you into some decisions you may later regret, at least it helps you move forward with life.
My husband isn’t the only guy who’s used what he learned from pickup artists to snag a wife. Nor is his nice-guy nature exceptional among seduction-advice consumers. Quite possibly, it’s the norm. Most guys probably don’t want an entire harem of hotties (one woman’s typically plenty of work). They just want to better themselves by learning a skill that, these days, is too often assumed to be beyond an individual’s control: “luck” with women. If pickup artists are among the few people loudly advertising that these skills aren’t innate – that they can be learned – is it such a surprise when “otherwise” nice guys buy what the pickup artists are selling?
One final thought: if I’m right about what attracts (genuinely) nice, nerdy guys to pickup artistry, I might also be able to reveal a pattern within the supposed sexual free-for-all of our ever-expanding universe of sexual subcultures. Maybe my fellow nerds aren’t attracted to sexual subcultures because their variety gives nerds license to indulge any random, bestial impulse, but because these subcultures are novel enough that the rules governing them are still made explicit, and skill at following those rules is acknowledged to be learned, not innate. Tedious as it may be for the average person to listen to an enthusiast drone on about the rules governing polyamory or BDSM, at least those “lifestyles” do appear to acknowledge the importance of clear rules, rituals, scripts, and boundaries.
As I said, sometimes tradition pops up in the most surprising places.
Published in General
There are two people involved, which means that even if one of them is “capable” of casual sex, the other one probably isn’t. But I’m skeptical anyone is, because sex is such a minefield. Even if people think it makes no impression on their body or soul, I think it does. It makes them more callous or more vulnerable or something, but not the same.
Yes, you’ve basically restated what I said, but as far as being skeptical about people being capable of it, I think this is a manifestation of the “typical mind” bias – assuming other people’s wiring is far more like you than it actually is. If the internet has done anything it’s show that people are vastly vastly different, and not just on trivial matters of personal preference. The way people experience themselves and the world appear to be inherently different in a lot of cases.
Defining flirting as not leading to unmarried sex presents rather the same problem as does defining “the hottest sex” as babymaking sex. It may be true in retrospect, but it’s really hard to gauge prospectively whether an episode of flirting will lead to unmarried sex, or an episode of sex to a baby.
Many honorable men will take sex if it’s offered. A man who engages in unmarried sex falls short of Christian perfection but doesn’t lose his honor – I’ve known too many honorable bachelors who’d take sex if they could get it to think otherwise. Rather, an honorable man respects boundaries. Not in a cringing way, but a gal with the courage to straight-out say “no” won’t be shamed or ridiculed by an honorable man.
I didn’t restate what you said because you didn’t say anything about TWO people being in the mix. And whatever people say online, humans are notoriously bad at knowing how something has affected them. I pointed out that so-called “casual” sex affects people in subtle but very real ways. Some blog post is not going to capture that.
I’ll make no comment on my daughter’s entertaining article about baby-making sex, except to say that I adore the results in their case. But I will disagree with you about honorable men because since I think there is no such thing as casual sex and that you can’t know how sex will affect that other person…well, you are likely to be using them. Many men probably haven’t thought this through, and in our highly sexualized and divorced-from-reality culture, we can’t be too hard on them. I will say, as some of the stories over on my Valentine’s Day thread attest, sometimes such sex is quickly made honorable and even brought couples together who maybe wouldn’t have married otherwise, but who are grateful. God does work in mysterious ways, but people today are faaaaaar too likely to proclaim that unmarried sex is perfectly honorable. Count me as a great skeptic.
Unmarried sex isn’t itself honorable. It is, however, an activity that men may engage in without forfeiting their honor, depending on how they do it – if it were not, we’d have to revise our opinion about a great many men whom we think of as honorable. The honor is a property of the man, not a property of the act.
Men can, and all do (women too), go in and out of honorable behavior. Because we’re all sinners.
Thank you for this post, Midge. I agree 100% with those who believe that dating more than one person at a time with no sex involved is a good thing, for so many reasons; one reason is that it discourages people from becoming too romantically involved with people they barely know. This can happen even if sex hasn’t happened. I have known men who seem to think that flirting with or being somewhat interested in more than one woman at a time is immoral: such men often find themselves deeply in love with one woman whom they either hardly know or have not even been on a date with. And they end up deeply disappointed when their intense emotions are not returned; the expectation of total monogamy from day one effects how people think, and it creates an environment where some people engage in a great deal of fantasizing about people who may or may not be interested in them. The men who do this are often trying to be nice, and they often find themselves rejected in favor of men who have no problem with being interested in more than one woman at a time. The latter type of man may or may not be a nice guy, but most women will prefer him because there’s less pressure with him, and he isn’t wrapped up in a total fantasy world.
As in all things.
Indeed!
I never ended up deeply disappointed because intense emotions I dared not express weren’t returned – I was too sensible for that. To tell the truth, oftentimes I was relieved that they weren’t returned – or even noticed. (I mean, I hope they weren’t noticed. It would be very embarrassing to find out they were.)
But the rare times I was offered romance (or something like it), I had a way harder time playing it cool than I should have. Though, much to some guys’ surprise, my bizarre emotional intensity wasn’t enough to undermine my chastity, it definitely left me vulnerable in ways women probably shouldn’t be vulnerable until marriage – or at least engagement. I had a hard time looking out for my own interests.
You’re describing my late-teen and early-20s self to a T. I repeatedly made this error and not only caused myself an incredible amount of heartache, missed out on a lot of fun with other women.
I once tried to develop this into a piece (pre-Ricochet) called “Dude, You’re Not Captain Wentworth” arguing that we underestimate how young men can be led astray my romantic fiction, even (especially) the good stuff; i.e., if you really love her, hold on and be constant: she’ll see how great you are eventually.
Sometimes it works out that way; more often not.
Yup. My experience too. Romantic fiction and bad advice not only make you miss opportunities, they burn you out.
Perhaps the lot of us should have been made to wear asbestos vests!
You folks are making me feel better about my bachelor decade.
Tangentially, is it just me, or is the gal in the picture wearing a D’Kora class starship necklace?
If so, it’s an even more awesome choice than I initially thought.
Well played.
This is so true. I knew a guy in college who could pick up women with ease. He was a drunk and a true misanthrope who treated women with contempt, and spoke of his conquests as complete idiots. A couple of the ladies were idiots, but most were intelligent and thoughtful. Yet for reasons that remain a mystery to me, they seemed to gravitate to this jerko. But then they would pine for him when he left them for some other pasture. I saw a couple of these gals fall into despair when he abandoned them. They believed he loved them. One attempted suicide. It was awful.
But reality has a way of winning in the end. He’s been divorced 3 times. He is now, at mid-fifties, just pathetic. He did it to himself in the end. Sadly, he inflicted a lot of hurt on the way.
The fact that you noticed this Tom, tells us a lot about you(-:
I tend to inspire strong reactions in people around me, and many people felt I was just far too intense/abnormal to be boyfriend material.
This was coupled with substantial cluelessness about women. So there were a number of forks in the road that I did not pick up because I was not sure they were even there.
Thank G-d.
Say what you want, man. My smoking-hot wife is a Trekkie, too. ;)
Yes, yes she is.
With my wife it was Dr. Who and Tolkien.
As for learning the skills: I am fond of the phrase:
“If you’ve loved one woman, you’ve known them all…if you’ve loved many women, you’ve known none.”
Pickup artists know how to manipulate women, but that is not the same as actually knowing one through an actual relationship.
Not sure if I should feel slighted for my cluelessness….
Merina these are my peeps (and yes probably me as well) fortunately as one is nearing the end of their fifth decade I get to thank my lucky stars that the “game” and issues that Midge is ruminating on is not a time sucking source of frustration. Oh and while casually mentioning frustrations, Merina… What is in the water cooler over at the Federalist? Thought you might have some insight. Shameless Click baiting, or conservative middle age women gone wild?
Now back to my slide ruler
iWc: I totally agree with you, but. It requires a certain amount of social skill to begin and then maintain a marriage. Yes, many puas are total jerks, but there is a reason why this phenomenon started: as Midge points out, lots of people, including men, find our current-what to call it? Social/romantic landscape very difficult to navigate. The lack of rules and clear guidelines have left many out in the cold. And pick up artistry addresses that problem, but like any skill, it can be used for good or evil.
Ha–you might gain some insight on this from Skippy’s thread on the member feed. It’s being discussed there. They are having sex week, which is a play on campus sex week, only the conservative version. Most of them aren’t middle-aged though, they are mostly young and conservative. I don’t think it’s meant as click bait, though of course everyone wants clicks, it’s just a conservative discussion of a timely topic during the week that’s about love.
I often think the Victorians had much more insight into basic human nature than our current free-for-all culture does. While not all of the Victorian rules and standards led to good outcomes, at least the presence of some kind of rules allowed for people like me to be be successful in their social lives.
We have seen several posts concerning the apparent trend for men to throw up their hands in frustration and disgust at the no-win nature of modern romantic life. When neither men nor women know what the rules are, this kind of surrender and withdrawal seems inevitable.
I remember at my 10 year high school reunion being amazed how many of the “loser”* guys I remembered from school had REALLY good looking wives.
*Should not be read as excluding myself from membership in the category
One of the upside results of being socially clueless is that once I found a woman who met my check-list and was clearly interested in me, I wasted no time in courtship. We met on a Thursday night, and were engaged Monday morning. I waited until she was tired, and her judgment was clouded.