It’s no secret that young men in nerd subculture spaces have trouble working out how to interact with women. It’s a well-known stereotype, in no small part because it rings true time and time again.
Why?
Part of the reason is that what we call “social skills,” we don’t treat like other things we consider “skills.” I’m skilled at Halo Reach because I’ve studied the maps, watched gameplay, learned from other players, and, of course, played the game for years.
But we treat “social skills” as something that’s only ever learned through passive experience throughout life, not as something that can (and should) be deliberately studied and practiced. And as a result, when someone does feel it necessary to learn human social dynamics from a coach or in a classroom-like environment, they become the subject of ridicule.
“He’s trying to learn how to talk to girls? Shouldn’t he have learned that in school?”
Passive life experience is a perfectly valid way to learn social skills, but some of us aren’t afforded low-risk opportunities to gain that experience throughout life. If a person’s social development was stunted to a significant enough degree, there comes a point at which most social interaction is too high-risk to be a reasonable learning experience.
It’s perfectly reasonable to need to learn these social dynamics the same way one would learn any other skill.
But there’s a problem.
The “young people’s social dynamics education” space is rife with “educators” with ulterior motives.
Some have a profit motive and push simplistic solutions that are effective at faking confidence but don’t address the real underlying issues. They promise easy success with women through techniques, scripts, tricks, and other forms of social subterfuge.
Others have a social engineering motive and try to turn their students into a sociopolitical ideal, grossly oversimplifying the social dynamics at play in human relationships. The techniques they promote fake not confidence, but harmlessness, and again, doesn’t address the real underlying issues.
Neither solves the problem, and both take advantage of those young people’s low status and lack of social skills to drag them into paradigms that don’t solve their social problems. And many young men recognize that both are scams, and that they’d get made fun of for participating anyway, so their paradigm becomes “why bother?”
That’s not to say that what these educators teach is completely without value, but the element of grift in play poisons the well unless they’re very carefully examined for which of their elements to internalize and which ones to ignore.
You don’t need an “open.” You don’t need to “neg,” or “close” women. You certainly don’t need to “peacock.” You don’t even need to talk to a lot of women to be good with them. But you do need to be confident, have some security in who you are and what you want, and be prepared to take rejection maturely.
You don’t need to obsess about your privilege, or about being an “ally.” You don’t need to be self-conscious about how every element of your behaviour will be perceived. But you do need to respect people’s boundaries, understand consent, and know that nobody owes you anything.
The fact is, it can take a year or more of deliberate learning to become proficient socially, but it can be done and it’s worth doing.
What nobody wants to talk about is that the stereotypical dating sim stat-raising paradigm probably maps a lot closer to reality than what a lot of real people are teaching about social dynamics.
Think about it. If you choose to work out, you’ll become more fit, and that will attract certain types of women. If you choose to study, you’ll become more intelligent, and that will attract certain types of women. Some games even have social skills as a stat you can raise!
If you know what to look for and you pay attention, you can probably learn more about the social dynamics of mate-seeking from watching modern romance anime, playing visual novels, and reading manga and light novels.
We’ll cover some in the next article.