I was a fat guy when I was younger, and I have a weak jaw so I looked kinda like Peter Griffin with the massive double chin I had. I lost weight and grew a beard. I went from hearing people giggle after I walked by and young guys laughing in my face to getting checked out and sometimes blatantly hit on regularly. I don’t regret this, especially the weight loss for health reasons, but it has had a net negative effect on my life.
There’s a reason I lurk in this sub. After I got divorced and jumped into online dating heavily in 2009 I needed help, I was still working on the weight and I had been with my ex-wife for seven years. A lot changed in dating from 2003-2009. I got infected by red pill thinking about dating - that there’s a single way to act that all women are attracted to, because AWALT. So I did that.
Here’s the thing. It worked. Between my appearance changes and me re-engineering my personality and lifestyle to be maximally marketable to the largest number of women, I got a LOT of attention and never had to go without a date if I didn’t want to. There are tons of women who still fall for the shit TRP preaches hook line and sinker. I broke hearts ruthlessly. I got rejected too, and had slumps, as we all do, but I succeeded more than I failed at getting dates and sex for the first time in my life.
The AWALT stereotype didn’t come from nowhere, it’s based on the behavior of a certain type of shallow, materialistic, Cosmo-reading, non-intellectual woman that you find a lot of in certain circles. These women value fitting the stereotype and buy what they’re sold in the media about womanhood. They’re gullible, in other words, and TRP targets them. I mean, think of the bell curve of human intelligence. If your goal is to stick it in as many holes as you can find, targeting the largest population of potential partners makes logical sense, which means people within 1 stddev of the mean.
But in the end, you get what you give and karma bites you. I had two relationships after my divorce with women who were abusive and treated me horribly. I wasn’t good to them either. My view of relationships was that they were a thing of their own that you could engineer to go a certain way and that you could separate the feelings stuff from the necessities and logistics of day to day life as a couple, and that you could make any relationship with anyone work if you could treat the household stuff more like a business and only let it be about feelings once business was taken care of.
Real, honest relationships don’t work that way. Everyone got severely hurt. I’m still struggling with the second abusive relationship and it ended two and a half years ago and I’ve dated since then, even had one short relationship with a woman who was 100% the opposite of the AWALT stereotype, so I know for a fact it’s not real and that I can attract good women who aren’t abusive or manipulative. But I also know what’s out there waiting to prey on guys like me, too. I’m not willing to roll the dice with my sanity right now.
This went long, thanks for prompting it.