The Knight is Gone and That is Okay
I have two friends.
One we will call the German groper and the other we will call the kind Canadian.
In the days that we went out these two individuals had two very different methods to approaching women.
Let’s start with the groper. The groper wasn’t as bad as his name intimates, but he did engage in excessive and often times unnecessary physical contact with women. In addition to this, he spoke closely and loudly and asked about thirty inappropriate questions per minute.
The kind Canadian on the other hand was the opposite. He was quiet and shy with a very sly sense of humor. He was someone you liked more and more as you got to know him. A product of prestigious boarding schools, he had the manners of someone of a certain breeding – as the English say.
Now, you might predict that our groper friend did horribly with women and our Hugh Grant friend crushed it. The puzzling reality though was that that wasn’t actually the case.
The German dated just as many attractive and smart women as the Canadian. He might have had a much lower success rate per encounter but he simply engaged way more.
He had a secret weapon.
He didn’t fear being rejected.
When a girl laughed at him and turned her back, he simply moved onto the next girl until he found one.
Margaret Atwood, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, writes that that when she asked a group of women why they feel threatened by men, they said, "We're afraid of being killed."
When she asked a male friend why men feel threatened by women, he answered, "We are afraid women will laugh at us."
The fear of being laughed at may seem trivial – and it is relative to being killed – but that fear has had an enormous impact on human history and probably everyone’s own personal histories / romantic trajectories.
So where does this fear come from?
The answer is our evolutionary past. Men fear being laughed at because for the vast majority of history there weren’t that many women around.
Let me explain.
Let’s imagine you are the kind Canadian’s ancestors living in a small tribal community in Scotland a few thousand years ago. The average size of a Neolithic community was 150 people. For the vast majority of human history that was the total number of humans that you contended with during the course of your life – (it is also known as Dunbar’s number – your brain is literally hard wired not to know more than 150 people). You likely spent your entire Neolithic life within a ten mile radius of where you were born.
So you’re a male aged 20 in this village and you need to find a mate. You’re looking at the population of women aged 14-20 as your potential mates, which means you’ve got a dating pool of roughly 10 women (likely mostly first and second cousins).
Imagine you approach one of these women and the approach doesn’t go well. Rather than showing her that you’re cool and fit and score high on the resource provider index, you’re a bumbling idiot. She then tells her nine friends that you’re an idiot. Your entire dating pool now shuns you and your ability to reproduce is gone, forever.
Given the extreme importance that any encounter with one of these ten women has towards your genetic legacy, you had to approach each encounter with consideration. Those who were not considerate or were laughed at, were weeded out of over time.
But our world today is vastly different from a village of 150 people. We live in cities of millions of people and we have access to billions more through the internet. Your reputation is not something that proceeds you – it almost does not matter at all given your ability to continuously meet new people.
Our German friend was a terrible hitter who struck out all the time but occasionally his wild swinging connected. He had somehow learned to de-program his brain from fearing embarrassment and rejection. And because of that, despite being worse looking, having worse manners, and less resources and in every way possible being less of a suitable mate, he actually still met and dated high quality women.
For most of human history, you just needed one female to laugh at you to be toast, but today you just need one women to smile and you potentially have a life partner. Men today are living in a video game with infinite lives. If you’re a guy and you’re wondering whether to approach a girl, remember that that internal weighing calculator is just old software from your evolutionary past that is no longer applicable to today’s reality. Always go for it.
And if you’re a girl and you’re lamenting that men these days have grown less tactful and more boorish in their behavior. Well you might unfortunately be right.
The rise of dating apps and online meetings in general allows for a whole range of social behavior that in the past would have never been tolerated. Gone are the knights in shining armor, replaced by a range of men who in aggregate invest less tact and diligence in their pursuit of you because they can.
But, before you get too upset at the present reality of men today, there is one last important thing to point out. Your evolutionary fear of being killed by a male you meet, which is the corollary to this male fear of being embarrassed, well that too is less rational in the present day and age. Your Neolithic female ancestors existed in an environment where being killed by a man (men have historically been responsible for +99% of all homicides) was something that happened rather often.
How do we know this?
Well we can look at the data from archeological sites.
These are the shares of deaths from violence in various ancient societies.
That might seem crazy but we can look at present day societies that are still stuck in the Neolithic age – that is small human tribes living in remote parts of the world – and in fact confirm that they are by and large exceedingly violent.
It would rightly make sense if you were a pre-historic women living somewhere in Europe who stumbled upon a lone male – your first thought should have been “Is he going to rape/kill me?” If you didn’t think that, well then that might have happened.
But that was then, what is true today?
What if you’re a modern day women living the city of New York – what are the odds that a men kills you?
There were 62 women murdered by men in the state of New York in the year 2017 a year in which roughly 88,000 women died. Your odds of death by a male was in other words 0.03%.
That is a vastly different reality from whence our psychology came. Now this is not to take away from the threat that men do pose to women in general or to diminish the rape and murder that still does occur, but it is nothing like the threat that this behavior posed in the ancient past. So women can lament the lost of the gallant knight, replaced by a guy swiping right on a dating app, but we also lost his cousin the crazy marauding rapist murderer. I’m not sure what he’s been replaced by but let’s just say that there are a lot of incels who look at pornography…
We can maybe call that progress.
