A couple others have mentioned warnings on doing something only to become attractive (e.g. You will tire of it or become resentful). Something like general fitness with multiple benefits likely isn't a problem, but there's also an alternate perspective that has worked really well for me. Instead of optimizing for attractiveness, consider optimizing for awesomeness. Being awesome will tend to make people attracted to you, but it has the added bonus of improving your self-confidence (which again increases attractiveness) and life-satisfaction.
As far as how to do this, I wouldn't mind tips myself, but the general gist of what I do is just keep that drive to be more awesome at the back of my mind when making decisions (in LW parlance, adopt awesomeness as an instrumental value). Anyone else have ideas?
Instead of optimizing for attractiveness, consider optimizing for awesomeness.
I wish I had said this. All other considerations are secondary. Indeed, it's likely that all other metrics (weight/physical shape, fashion/clothing, flirting/conversation) are merely indicators that people use to try to gauge your actual awesomeness. Optimizing for the source rather than the signals is a great move, I'd upvote your comment multiple times if I could.
If your friends were also optimizing for awesomeness and your guiding principle was widely known, this ought to lead to the unanticipated appearance of some very interesting objects in the vicinity.
There is no limit to the amount of time you can throw at developing some arbitrary impressive talent. At the moment I'm optimising for linear algebra and statistics instead. Personally, I think this is a different kind of awesome, but fewer people want to hear about the pros and cons of a given econometric model.
First of all, as other people have said, if you are heavily overweight, then working out and becoming not-fat is easily the most important thing you can do.
Anyway, I am sort of trying to do the same thing you are and here's what I've found.
After physical appearance, the lowest hanging fruit seems to be in the confidence/status/how you carry yourself/body language/power/assertiveness area, a cluster that you might call "swag" for lack of a better term. I think women don't care about physical appearance quite as much as men do when it comes to attraction, and care about swag much more than men do.
The lowest hanging fruit in the broader category of swag seem to me to be the following:
In particular, I'm trying to adopt the habits of a) looking women strongly in the eye and letting her be the one to break away most of the time, and b) briefly making eye contact with and smiling at all the girls I pass in the hallway or on the street or whatever. For the former, something that's helped me is practicing making eye contact while wearing sunglasses - this way you can make yourself comfortable with the feeling of st...
I want to spend a substantial fraction of my time optimizing myself in the direction of being more attractive to females,
One minor issue that would help social attractiveness- don't refer to women as "females". It can come across as either autistic or sexist.
being more attractive to females
I would like to direct your attention to Be Specific and the Attractiveness: Mean and Variance section of Rational Romantic Relationships. (unfortunately I can't link directly to that section of the article).
What I mean is this: which women do you really want to become attractive to? In addition to the term "females" seeming perhaps autistic, or sexist as JoshuaZ points out, it also seems animalistic. You're not a bird asking for advice on how to build a beautiful nest, grow a beautiful plume of feathers or sing the prettiest song... in order to be "more attractive to females". You're a human, and you have a complex personality and complex interests, and so the optimal strategy is not just to ask the biological question of what things will make you most attractive in general to all of the females of our species. I mean, those things do matter. But a much better question is to figure out what kind of women you want to attract, and then figure out the subtleties that will help you interest them and attract them. You also, of course, want the behaviour that results to be consistent with your own personal preferences, at least in s...
For the girls you're probably interested in, i.e. intellectual curious, nerdy, nice girls, you don't need to be super fit, just not overweight. Most of the attraction comes from conversation, in which you engage in a mutual storytelling process. Have an interesting hobby, show off your humor and creativity. That's what worked for me.
The first obvious choice is getting fit, although it's about two years I'm trying different diets with no results.
To emphasize the rational in my reply: I challenge you by saying the above claim is not true. Dieting for a day or a week or a month with no results is possible (and frustrating). Dieting for two years "with no results" means either a rare medical condition (seek help from a professional) or, more likely, you are dieting incorrectly and refraining from rationally noting this fact and trying to be less wrong. A big hint for me is you ask what exercise you should do and you do not say what you've tried. You can eat optimally and be unhealthy if you do not excercise minimally. This is not esoteric information so again I challenge you that you are self-sabotaging.
I have been where you are. Now I am healthier and happier. Having many people say 'aw, it's okay, be yourself' didn't help. A few people who spoke bluntly (far more than I have done here to you) was the trick. Letting myself off easy didn't help. Changes helped. Stopping doing what didn't work helped. Work hard to better yourself, for yourself, and many good things will follow. You will do things you don't want to do along the way, and be glad for it later.
I'm female and I didn't date at all until I was 22 . People very rarely seemed to be attracted to be before that, but since then, I haven't found it at all hard to get dates! I think 3 of the most important changes I made are as applicable to men as to women:
Learning to dress better. I figured out what clothes suited me and wore them.
Becoming better at socialising. I had been terribly socially anxious before that, which made it hard for me to talk to new people.I went on antidepressants for generalised anxiety and depression, but an accidental side effect was that they made me massively less socially anxious. I made friends much more easily, and that meant I could meet and talk to people I was interested in dating.
Not worrying too much about whether a particular guy liked me or not. Becoming too keen too quickly can be offputting, so remembering that there are lots of other men in the world was a good idea!
I'm still not great at relationships, but that's another story!
So everyone in these comments seems to be concentrating on looking nice and being fit, which is all well and good for general purpose "attractiveness" but I've found that while it's helpful to look cool and be confident, my best and most reliable source of intimacy, female companionship, etc. is NOT based on that.
The best way in my experience is to find a way to hang out with women in a low pressure social environment that is not designed for seduction or anything like that. College dorms are the perfect example of this but obviously you can't just go hang out in them to pick up chicks. The key is to have an environment where both you and the people you might be interested in already want to be. Hanging out at a friends' house, going to meetups, or joining classes are all reasonable alternatives for this. It's ok to have dating as a background goal for your activities, but I've found that if you go to something for the sole purpose of meeting women you will most often be frustrated and not have fun, so I recommend finding activities that you're interested in trying but haven't before. Juggling, dancing, rock climbing (as mentioned in another post) all can be fun, and tend to be very welcoming to newcomers. Climbing especially has a lot of downtime for chatting with people, but has the downside of taking place in public or semi-public areas which is anti-conducive to having more personal conversations that are important to getting to know potential intimates.
Also: Okcupid (or the Italian equivalent) can be useful.
Thank you everybody, that is a massive amount of advice!
I've tried to sum it up into a few bullet points.
First of all, many people have pointed out the importance of meta thinking about my goals:
beware of diminishing returns;
do something that improves your life, not only your attractiveness.
These are sensible and very important suggestions, which I've tried to keep in mind while compiling the list of things I should do.
The obvious winner is to lose weight (that is, lose fat), which is at one time the most important and most hard thing to do. Is there a name for things like that? It seems to share the same epistemic position of FAI: at one time mostly important and almost impossibly difficult. WTF universe?
The silver medal, to my surprise, goes to improving my fashion (thank again to everybody who suggested how to do that). This flies a bit in the face of optimizing for a better life in general, but I guess that if something is important, it is important. I'll dig into that.
The bronze medal, and my second surprise, goes to learn how to socialize.
The fourth place goes to exercise, and the fifth place goes to pick up a new hobby.
If I had to cluster those impr...
living in Italy in a 20k people town, with a job paying me about $20k a year
Small pool of women, unattractive salary. Move to a bigger town (which is also the best way to facilitate change within yourself, changing your surroundings), fall in with the fitness crowd (peer pressure, "yo bro do you even lift?"), make your dabbling in "logic/math/AI" a "learning how to program" at least doubling your income. Don't come across as desperate, and the best way to achieve that isn't to hide it, but not to be desperate for validation anymore.
make your dabbling in "logic/math/AI" a "learning how to program" at least doubling your income.
A minor point: this coul probably work in the US, but it doesn't in Italy. Average salary for a good programmer (not outstanding, but at least experienced) is around $25k. It should also be noted that the cost of living in Italy is slightly lower, so $20K per year, while not impressive, it's still a decent salary.
Given that your name looks familiar from Hacker News and your website suggests you like programming for its own sake, you should consider coming to Silicon Valley after the US congress finishes loosening up immigration restrictions for foreign STEM workers (which seems like it will probably happen). In the San Francisco area, $100K + stock is typical for entry-level people and good programmers in general are famously difficult to hire. Also, lots of LW peeps live here. My housemates and I ought to have a couch you can crash on while you look for a job. In the worst case it'll just be a vacation for you to visit the US and hang out with the LW people that live around here. PM me if you want more info and stuff.
(This also goes for other people who are good programmers who don't live in Silicon Valley and don't have a good reason not to move here.)
I have known several very overweight men who've managed to be very attractive to women. I'm not quite sure how they did it, but whatever they did worked. They have generally been pretty charismatic and charming.
Just want to add that AFAICT losing weight and not regaining it is very hard. I think only a very small number of dieters manage to keep weight off in the long run (though paleo etc might be more effective than most diets - I'm not sure). I'm not convinced that dieting is the "lowest hanging fruit," but I'm not sure how MrMind could develop the kind of charisma required to be attractive despite being very overweight.
I would invest some time in figuring out which activities will give you large attractiveness gains and which will give marginal ones, then put your efforts into the former.
You probably don't want to hear this, but if you're heavily overweight, losing it will be a pretty huge gain, not just in terms of being attractive to women, but in terms of how seriously everyone will take you. I've been both 140kg and 90kg. There is massive prejudice against overweight people, and life is so much easier when you don't have to fight against it.
Other people will probably offer you plenty of detailed and conflicting advice on how to lose weight. Mine would be to walk a lot, and to be aware of the calorie content of your food. You can go a long way on that alone. Regardless of how you do it, working on your weight should absolutely be your priority.
In terms of fostering other "attractive" traits, I will first offer a word of warning: don't do anything solely because you believe it will make you more attractive to women. You will tire of it or become resentful. That doesn't mean you can't pick things you independently want to do, which also happen to be considered quite attractive, ...
1) As hobbies, arts and crafts are oversubscribed by women. If you take a pottery class, for example, you will meet a lot of women in a non-competitive environment, and have at least one major thing to talk to them about.
2) Being able to create beautiful things is a personally desirable skill.
3) If you're a technical/maths type, having something "artsy" under your belt makes you seem like a more well-rounded person.
4) You have the ability to produce personalised tokens of affection.
Anecdotally, since I took up life drawing, I have been staggered by the number of women who've professed an interest in modelling for me. In some cases this is flirting and in others it's genuine platonic interest in being drawn; distinguishing the two is a minor hazard, but both are pretty welcome.
Here's a piece of advice I haven't seen mentioned on this topic: people are typically irrational about sex, and you can make yourself an appealing partner to a minority of people who aren't being "well served" by the general population simply by being extra open-minded. In short, I'm going to advocate exploring kink spaces.
First, cultivate the aliefs that there is zero shame associated with consensual sexual activity of any kind, and that there is no space for sex-specific morality in your code of ethics. The slogan "everyone owns exactly on...
I suggest moving to a place where you-as-you-are will be more attractive to females. More specifically, China - it has a combination of features that make expats quite successful with the local women (or at least stack the deck in your favor):
If you get a fashion consultant and spend one day and $700 plus fees going shopping, you will gain as much attractiveness as if you spent a full year of 2x/week intense exercise with a personal trainer.
I've personally done both and I've put a lot of thought into "efficient attractiveness". I have developed an eye for clothes and it totally changed your perspective in every social interaction, you can't un-see it.
But that method is much higher variability. It might make said people uncomfortable, and they may not be very helpful unless they have a strong desire to help you.
A guy who had asked me out and been turned down asked me this. It made me pretty uncomfortable. I would say things like, "You could wear this sort of thing, but there's an element of personal style, what do you prefer?" and he would say things like "What do you like most?" Being directly asked how to optimize his fashion for causing me to be attracted to him was... not an attractant, and made me feel really weird. I don't feel comfortable telling someone who I'm not currently dating how I would prefer them to dress.
You can go about this more tactfully, but there's still some weird subtext even so.
(We ended up dating later despite this.)
I think that losing weight + moving to a larger town + increasing income is all good advice, but I don't think those things are easy or will give you the biggest bang for your buck.
One very easy thing you can do to increase your attractiveness is to change your goal from "short to medium-term sexual relationships" to love and commitment. I know you don't really want to do that, but that is what most women are looking for. I know plenty of women who, as they get to their mid-thirties and are single or divorced, become more interested in commitme...
If you don't have good posture, an Alexander technique trainer can help with that. Good posture is very attractive, and it will make you look and feel more confident, and also reduce your risk of getting RSI - I haven't had shoulder pain since I learned to sit right.
In case you don't already do, I suggest paying attention to what guys around you look like (e.g. their clothes and how they fit them, their hairstyle, their facial hair or lack thereof, their jewellery or lack thereof, etc.) as often as reasonably possible, in different situations; after a while your System 1 may get better at telling whether a guy (e.g. yourself) is attractive as a result. (Except for stuff like height or facial symmetry that's not easily changed, what's considered attractive in a guy probably varies a lot from culture to culture, possibly even within Italy, so overly specific advice for such-and-such hairstyle or whatnot may not generalize well to your locale.)
My only hobby at the moment are the game of Go and dabbing in math/logics/AI, which, as fascinating as they are, are seldom considered very attractive.
I personally used to play Go a lot (my playing strength was something like 1-2 kyu). I replaced that hobby completely with Salsa/Bachata dancing. The first few months were out of my comfortzone but afterwards I consider the experience to be more fun than playing Go and it produces more positive benefits than playing Go.
Anyone here know anything about training your speaking voice? That seems a rarely explored but powerful aspect of attractiveness.
Buying fashionable clothes that fit well is very important. There are tips and guides online about how to do it. Actual name brands can make some difference, but aren't hugely important as long as the clothes are nice.
For weight-loss I can't recommend weight-lifting enough. Not only will you lose weight, and do so quicker and less painfully than with cardio, you'll also get a bump in testosterone production for several months. This boosts confidence by a large degree. Seriously, you'll feel great.
I don't know if you know how to talk to girls, but that's probably the most important thing of all. Flirting is a skill. Unfortunately I don't know where one can go to learn this. Anyone else have resources?
Symmetry isn't just about the skeleton-- it's also possible to be asymmetrical because of habitual muscle tension. I haven't heard of any research on how non-skeletal asymmetry affects attractiveness.
Losing weight and becoming more fit will make you healthier and more attractive. You can't effectively gain muscle and lose weight at the same time. In your case losing weight should be the priority. To do this, start tracking absolutely everything you eat using one of the many free trackers available out there, and eat below your TDEE. Invest $10 in a digital scale so you can track more accurately. If you don't know what you should eat, read this. Exercise is helpful to your general health, but losing weight is almost entirely about diet. Practically all ...
I'll repeat my suggesting to write fiction.. While this strategy can work for any gender/orientation it's especially effective for straight males given disproportionate female interest in fiction (especially romantic fiction.)
Bonus: Women who read romance novels have a higher sex drive. (pdf)
If you haven't tried it seriously already, do Atkins. I.e. low-carb. Completely eliminate sugar, corn, wheat, bread, HFCS, potatoes, non-diet soda, milk (but not cream and butter), and so forth. Don't count calories or carbs. Just don't eat these foods or products that contain them. Avoid low-fat foods such as egg whites and skim milk. Avoid transfats.
Atkins doesn't work for everyone; but it works for more people than it doesn't; and most of the people it fails with, it fails because of a failure to maintain the diet. If you have tried Atkins before; but didn't really stick to it, or cheated a lot, try it again and this time use precommittment and buddy practices to increase the likelihood you'll stick with it.
The subreddit r/malefashionadvice is quite good for advice on dressing well. I went from dressing 1 sd below average to 2 sd above average using it (with prompting from CFAR camp). The guides on the sidebar are the highest value. Most of the other posts are not useful. I have also give a presentation on the topic a couple times (slides, video)
but I cannot really change that, and sole-lifts or make-up are so short-term solutions to border on 'tricking women'
On reflection, I think the kind of 'trick' involved here is one you want to exploit.
Attraction seems to be pre-rational. We can introspect rationally about it, but in such an evolutionarily fraught topic we can expect all sorts of biases.
Women, girls, seem to decorate themselves instinctively. I know my 4 year old was not trying to attract a mate when she would spend an hour in front of the mirror working on her hair, or hours playi...
I suspect that your lowest-hanging fruit right now is probably losing weight, although I appreciate that that's easier said than done. I don't have any experience with that, so I won't try and offer any advice regarding it, but I can weigh in with a few words of advice on dressing well:
I don't think 'fashion' in the sense of buying and wearing expensive brands is particularly important, but having some taste and competence in telling a good outfit from a bad one goes a long way. I would say that things to consider are fit, quality, and patterning/colour/ot...
A minor one I'd add.
It's important to share cultural context with people, to make yourself part of their ingroup in various ways.
A simple way to do that is to pick some reasonably popular bands/groups who's music you like and spend a modest amount of time becoming familiar with them. the band, their members and the music well enough that you can sing along with it.
it's an investment of a few days plus listening to some music in the background.
Then when someone says "what music are you in to" you can answer with something reasonable. Even if it's a band they don't like themselves it's better than "I'm not really into music"
heavily overweight
Start working on losing weight. I see that you are already taking steps, and it is commendable! Have you tried a gluten-free diet? Have you been avoiding fried/roasted food? Have you been calorie-counting?
It is not easy -- in fact, it is insanely hard work! -- and it takes a long time to see results. But, as you probably already know, exercising will improve your mood, and the release of testosterone as a result of intense working out will change the way you interact with people (not just women) in general -- you exude more confidence ...
If you want to be more physically attractive you don't want to just "lose weight" but look fit and healthy. How to do this isn't obvious, as mainstream health advice doesn't achieve this for most people. You should expect to spend considerable time researching and learning about fitness and nutrition. Look to emulate methods that work, not ones well understood by science- it is a myth that nutritional science has advanced to the point where we can design effective diet and fitness programs entirely from basic biological knowledge.
This is a good a...
I thought I saw a book recommendation on fashion here on LessWrong. But I can't seem to find it. Does anyone have a recommendation?
I've also been told multiple times by multiple sources that women values confidence, competence and leadership. I understand the confidence part in being able to express without embarassment your interest (but still in a socially graceful manner), but I would really like pointers about what area of my life I could engage to become more competent or a leader. In what domains women like competence/leadership?
It would be useful to know what's your job. I've gained a lot of confidence with people in general since I left the Unversity (used to be a physicist...
Are you Italian? Girls in Russia love Italian guys. Just saying :-)
For gaining confidence, I recommend any full contact sport. But do some Starting Strength first. That should help with weight loss too.
Being happy is a higher order goal than becoming attractive correct? How about picking up meditation instead? You shouldn't need to rely on anyone but yourself to be a happy person.
Here's some simple instructions to get you started. If interested, google "Progressive Stages of Meditation in Plain English" for more detailed instructions.
I say optimize for health and longevity, but I'm biased in that regard. Physical health is instrumentally useful for almost anything else you do. You will be more confident, you will be smarter, you will build desirable traits of self control, you will look better, and you will be more attractive.
There's a lot of strong opinions about dieting and exercise floating around here. I'd say be a good "bayesian" and really try the status quo advice first, don't rationalize yourself around it, and see for yourself. It's a relatively small amount of suffe...
If you've already tried things like low-carb diets and Shangri La, losing weight is probably impossible for you short of Adipotide or liposuction, so ignore all the well-meaning advice from the metabolically privileged about how easy this would be if you just ate less and exercised.
Exercise can still be beneficial even if an individual isn't metabolically lucky (I wouldn't say privileged -- if we still lived in a world of scarcity rather than abundance it wouldn't be much of a privilege). Some heavy people carry their weight well, because they've exercised, practiced good posture, etc.
High status, enough fame to broadcast across many possibilities, and sufficiently good Harry Potter fanfiction to convey a sense of my personality. (If you like HJPEV's personality you will probably like mine, though we are not the same person.) Currently down to 2 local and 1 East Coast girlfriend, btw. This pathway is not tremendously duplicable, but it was easier for me than learning to dress well or studying light-side pickup because I needed to do the work for other reasons anyway.
Fat is a problem for me because of how it affects things like sleep, and energy during daily work - having your fat cells suck out all the glucose you need is not helpful. If you can lose weight, you should obviously do so. If you haven't yet tried low-carb and Shangri-La, both seem relatively obvious things to attempt; the first seems to have a high success rate and the second is very easy. It's the people telling you to buckle down and use willpower who should be ignored - I know of exactly one case of that working, all other cases of weight loss in my personal experience did not involve what I would consider to be significant willpower.
There is no thermodynamic law stating that fat cells must release fat just because your body needs it. If you're built so that weight loss is impossible and you try eating less, your metabolism slows down - possibly in much the same way it would as if you tried eating less and you had no fat cells whatsoever. I can't cite studies but wouldn't be particularly surprised to see that muscle gets cannibalized instead of fat being lost, if you try to eat less than the most slowed metabolism needs. And if most metabolically disprivileged people stop trying to eat below their minimal metabolic rate before doing significant damage to themselves, that's just the survival instinct kicking in. I would seriously not be surprised to find that fat people have starved to death without their fat cells releasing fat, and blinded by preconceptions, nobody managed to notice or note down when this occurred. But I would expect that to be rare - most people, if their body tells them they're starving to death, will eat. This gets cited as weakness of will.
Metabolically privileged people assume that if you eat less, your fat cells will release fat. (Bitter laughter.) No. We don't have energy stora...
I would seriously not be surprised to find that fat people have starved to death without their fat cells releasing fat, and blinded by preconceptions, nobody managed to notice or note down when this occurred. But I would expect that to be rare - most people, if their body tells them they're starving to death, will eat. This gets cited as weakness of will.
What outcomes would this metabolic hypothesis predict for obese people who undergo gastric bypass surgeries which render them physically incapable of eating much? What percentage of these patients would be expected to die of malnutrition? What effect on their body composition would be expected?
After working out the predictions of this hypothesis, are they consistent with what actually happens?
I would seriously not be surprised to find that fat people have starved to death without their fat cells releasing fat, and blinded by preconceptions, nobody managed to notice or note down when this occurred.
Out of curiosity, I googled, and indeed it turns out that some of the heaviest people on record died of starvation.
A zero-carb diet for a couple of weeks did not produce any ketosis as measured by a ketosis stick. Also lipolysis != dead fat cells.
I wrote a text a few weeks ago about how to use evolution for that
I do think I know a lot about this, so I'll try the style: be harsh, say what is priority and what ain't, leave, hope for the best.
1) Don't wait until you are thin to start optimizing your conversation, but indeed, loose weight as soon as possible. 2) Don't move into a city where to get a girl you depend on a car if you don't have a car. Everyone underestimates practical issues. 3) If getting strong by lifting weights is "pain" for you, do only shoulder sides and neck sides, al...
This comment used to be full of what I thought was lucid and useful advice, but it was immediately downvoted and so I have replaced the comment with this message. I hope whoever downvoted the original comment was justified in doing so; I urge them to consider that they may be doing harm to the community, for whatever that's worth.
I want to spend a substantial fraction of my time optimizing myself in the direction of being more attractive to females, and I'd really appreciate your suggestions on how to do so.
Why
It should be pretty self-explanatory, but in case you're wondering: relationships are a big part of personal happiness, and where I am now, I feel more inclined toward increasing the number and variability of short- or middle-term sexual relationships rather than just picking a girl who wants to be my wife and run with it. But at the moment women aren't exactly chasing me down the streets, so I want to offer them a more pleasant experience of my company than what it already is.
Mind-killing
I sincerely think this post should provoke none of the above. I'm not asking for ways to trick women into liking me, nor about gender differences about what males prefer over females, etc. Please try really hard to avoid mind-killing subjects into your comments. I'm 'just' asking for ways to change myself into being a more sexually attractive human being.
Caveat(s)
I'm aware of the dichotomy lying around: attraction can be created vs attraction can only be amplified. In both cases there should be at least something that can be done.
I'm also aware that some people strongly dislike posts full of personal details, so I will try to keep them at minimum, while at the same time trying to provide the necessary description of my situation.
I would like
Try to aim for advice on stable improvements, about aspects that are proven to be sexually attractive to straight females, in the age range of 20 to 40.
For example, I know that height or facial symmetry are proven to result universally attractive, but I cannot really change that, and sole-lifts or make-up are so short-term solutions to border on 'tricking women' (yes, I know that women use those tricks too, I simply would like to invest my time better).
My situation
This is the shortest possible description: I'm a straight male in my thirties, heavily overweight, living in Italy in a 20k people town, with a job paying me about $20k a year.
If you think you need more details ask for them in the comments or PM me.
What I'm already doing/planning to do
The first obvious choice is getting fit, although it's about two years I'm trying different diets with no results, so I'd really need pointers in that direction. I've also heard about training programs that tells you to concentrate on shoulders, because apparently shoulder-to-waist ratio of 1.5 or more is especially attractive.
I've also been told multiple times by multiple sources that women values confidence, competence and leadership. I understand the confidence part in being able to express without embarassment your interest (but still in a socially graceful manner), but I would really like pointers about what area of my life I could engage to become more competent or a leader. In what domains women like competence/leadership?
My only hobby at the moment are the game of Go and dabbing in math/logics/AI, which, as fascinating as they are, are seldom considered very attractive.
What I'm not sure about
Is fashion important? I understand that I need to dress well for my built, but I would like to know if a Versace button down shirt is more attractive than a plain brand one.
False beliefs
Do you think am I doing the right thing? Or am I wrong in my search for attractiveness? Should I concentrate on something totally unrelated? Dose the physical aspect matter or I should concentrate more on character? Am I completely off track?
If you think I'm grossly mistaken, in the name of Omega let me know!
Downvote
If you think this post doesn't belong in a community devoted rationality and self-improvement, feel free to downvote, but at least try to indicate a way to better phrase the problem or point me to another community I can ask the same question.
Thank you very much!