Hack Your Mating

By Tony Vakirtzis

Women can be a very passionate affair, but to reverse a failing or mediocre mating life you need to set passion aside and approach the problem rationally. This is what this book is about, the rational path to sexual abundance.

The average man in the United States will have sex with around five or six women in his life, and he probably won´t be crazy for most of them. Divorce rates are at 50%. The "seduction" industry and online dating have never been bigger. Clearly men aren't happy with the quantity or quality of their women. The reason, as you will see, is that we are hardwired with emotions that evolved during ancient social environments that were unrecognizable to today's. Those ancient environments are long gone, but the emotions and behaviors they created are still with us, because the genes that create our brain evolve painfully slow. But modern social conditions have never been more favourable for the common man. The sex life of a king is yours for the taking. All you need is to adjust your mating behavior to the social reality of the 21st century. That's it. I will show you how this is done.

I won't promise you that when you're finished reading you'll be able to have any woman you want. You won't. Nor will I promise a secret technique that will effortlessly have women approaching you. Unless you're a celebrity or a millionaire, that's never going to happen, and we'll see why in the first two chapters. Freeing yourself from these destructive ideas is half the game, and if you are willing to abandon them I can assure you no other book will transform your relationship with women as quickly and dramatically. It is your best chance of turning the corner and joining the elite group of men who can have more women than they know what to do with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Old Marston Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781999630119

Book preview

HACK YOUR MATING

An evolutionary psychologist’s guide to a life of sexual abundance

Tony Vakirtzis, PhD.

Copyright © 2018 Antonios Vakirtzis

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the copyright holder, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: [e-mail]

Old Marston Press

ISBN: 978-1-9996301-1-9

Cover design by theartoftheword.com

To Chris Deoudes.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the people who gave valuable feedback on earlier versions of this book: Chris Murray, Patricia Vakirtzi, William Knight, Maria Delioglani, George Tsouvelas and Ioannis Stavrakas. Cheryl Harding and Elaine Hatfield kindly allowed me to quote from their works; permission was also obtained from Oxford University Press and Taylor & Francis, respectively. The male images used in Figures 2 and 3 are publicly available on the web courtesy of Lisa DeBruine and Benedict Jones.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. HUMAN MATING: THE BIG PICTURE

Why you're cheap

Just how cheap are you?

A bird’s eye view of our mating system

What women want

Can I increase my mate value?

CHAPTER 2. PSYCHOLOGICAL METHODS

What is a psychological method?

The stuff psychological methods are made of

A case study in scientific theories

The big black box

Why nothing is free

Evolved faculties and acquired skills

Honest signals and cheap talk

All you have to do is show up

CHAPTER 3. THE ECOLOGICAL METHOD.

The evolutionary logic of your social life

Meet your mate value sociometer

The root of your mating problems

Sequential mate choice and mating probabilities

How cold approach will change your life

A world without mating constraints

The best partner and womanizer

A recipe for misery

Recap: the rational path to sexual abundance

CHAPTER 4. APPROACH ANXIETY

A vast disconnect, and a not so low hanging fruit

The brute force method

Ingroups and outgroups

Approach anxiety and mating anxiety

A dramatic mutation

Fear of rejection

Your road map

CHAPTER 5. SHOWING UP

Principles

Cold approach logistics

The opening line

Honesty

Walkers and stoppers

The easy exit

Out with a friend

AFTERWORD: SAYING GOODBYE TO THE REGRET FACTORY

CONTACT

FURTHER READING

INTRODUCTION

Hack

noun (informal): method for solving a problem or gaining large benefits with modest time and effort; shortcut

A girl once asked me if I had ever been rejected. I don’t remember who or where. We were around seventeen, this much I remember. I looked her in the eye and proudly told her I had never been rejected, and it was the truth. What I didn’t tell her was that I’d barely been kissed. If the girl asked me the same question today, more than twenty years later, I would tell her I’ve been rejected more times than a man could possibly remember. With a gun to my head I’d say probably between two and three thousand times, maybe more. If I could somehow count the rejections of my father, and his father, and the father of his father, hundreds of generations back, I would confidently predict I’ve been rejected more times than all those men combined. But I’ve also had a better mating life than any of them. Better, I suspect, than all but a small minority of men who ever lived. I’ve done things with women that to my ancestors would seem like magic. They would seem like magic to me a few years back. And I did them not because I was richer, smarter or better looking. It was because I hacked my mating: I aligned my behavior to the social reality around me. When people ask me to describe my book in one sentence, I tell them it is about the cost of rejection in modern environments. There is none. Understanding this – and acting accordingly - is all you need to change your relationship with women and your life.

A few words about my background, so you can better understand the origin and nature of this book. I am an evolutionary psychologist by training. After undergraduate psychology studies in Greece, where I am from, I came to the UK in 2005 to do a master’s degree in evolutionary psychology at the University of Liverpool. The program was run out of the biology department, and we were instructed by a group of biologists and psychologists. Two years later I went on to do a PhD at the same university. My thesis was in female mate choice, or the way in which women select their sexual partners. For three years I studied a phenomenon known as nonindependent mate choice.[1] This is when women are influenced in their choice of men by what they see other women doing - in particular who other attractive women are selecting. If you ever dated a very attractive woman you might know what I mean - you probably found yourself getting more attention next to her than any other time in your life. While baffling from a sociological perspective - why should other women be interested in a taken man, after all? - biologically the phenomenon is straightforward, and we will visit it briefly in the second chapter.

What is evolutionary psychology? In one sentence, it is psychology that is informed by biology, especially evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychologists’ overarching principle is that their theories and research programs must agree with what is known in biology, just like those of biology must agree with chemistry, those of chemistry must agree with physics and so forth. This principle of interdisciplinary compatibility is referred to as conceptual integration.[2] Human behavior is generated by the brain, which is a biological machine created by genes that have evolved over millions of years. If we consider the environments where these genes evolved, we will more easily understand the types of brains they built as a response and consequently the types of behaviors these brains are generating today. Stunningly, prior to the recent arrival of evolutionary psychology, psychologists did not generally bother with conceptual integration, as straightforward and even mundane a concept as it is.  As a result, the field was littered with arbitrary theories that ignored our evolutionary past and were disconnected from biological reality. These disparate theories had nothing in common except that, after a period of initial excitement and popularity, they fell by the wayside and were largely forgotten.[3]

The most studied area in evolutionary psychology is human mate choice, and mating behavior in general.[4] Like all people, scientists like to pick the low hanging fruit first. In this case the low hanging fruit was the wealth of biological research on other species’ mating behavior which psychologists had not, up to that point, even bothered to look at. Evolutionary psychologists have spent four decades turning what did not even exist as a field into one of the hottest areas of research in all of psychology. We will put their most relevant findings to good use throughout this book.

What evolutionary psychology is still lacking, however, is practical interventions for people’s daily lives. As far as I am aware there has been no popular evolutionary psychological method for fighting depression, for example, or a book for child-rearing. And there has been, sadly, no attempt to help men improve their mating life. This is not that surprising. Scientists’ primary research priorities are that their topics be easy to study (low hanging fruit) and fit nicely within their existing theories. The social usefulness of their research - the degree to which it can help real people - is usually of little importance to them. Consequently, the areas they study are often of no immediate benefit to society. Also, the format in which findings are produced and disseminated is not designed with the common man in mind, and evolutionary psychologists are no more interested in applying their knowledge to their own personal lives than, say, chemists or geologists. Your average evolutionary psychologist, even the one who studies human mating behavior - I can assure you from personal experience - has no more success with women than the man on the street. He simply has not been trained to think in these practical terms and wouldn't know where to start if the task were presented to him.

In the absence of science, the void has been filled with lay Pickup Artist (PUA) and seduction community material. I will use the umbrella term psychological methods to refer to commercially available taught methods that are supposed to enhance a man’s sexual success via scripted language or behavior. A substantial part of this book will be devoted to explaining why psychological methods simply cannot work as marketed. But you don't have to be familiar with psychological methods to make the most of this book. It is written in a way that will benefit the largest male audience, including men who have never heard of PUA or have never picked up a book on women before. The only thing you will need is motivation, the sincere desire to improve your mating life. The specifics of your motivation are irrelevant. The book will work regardless of what you want from women: have sex with as many of them as possible, find and marry the love of your life, or anything in between.

I won't promise you that after reading this book you'll be able to have any woman you want. You won't. Nor will I promise a secret technique that will effortlessly have women approaching you. Unless you're a celebrity or a millionaire, that's never going to happen in the real world, and we will see why in the very first chapter. Much less will I promise you that you can have your ex-girlfriend back, money-back guaranteed. Your ex-girlfriend has already evaluated you thoroughly and rejected you – it is very unlikely she will ever want you back. A man who has gone without a woman for some time will often get so desperate as to eagerly hand over his money in exchange for ridiculous promises like these, promises which I took from popular seduction websites. But if you are willing to give up on psychological methods and on the idea of having any one particular woman, I can assure you that no other book will transform your relationship with women as quickly and dramatically. It is your best chance of turning the corner and joining the very small and elite group of men who have hacked their mating and can have as many women as they want. At the end of the book I will share some thoughts on the knock-on effects this hack can have on other areas of your life and how it can be the impetus for your transformation into a better all-around man.

CHAPTER 1.

HUMAN MATING: THE BIG PICTURE

Mating

noun: the pairing of animals for reproduction; copulation

Why you're cheap

Independent of how useful they are, the price of goods is determined by their scarcity. Take water, the basis of all life - it is so abundant as to be nearly free at the tap. Or take coal and diamonds, both made of carbon. Because diamonds are scarce and coal is abundant, a tiny diamond costs thousands of dollars while an entire ton of coal is around fifty dollars.

In matters of human biology there are no explicit market prices, but the same fundamental relationship between scarcity and value applies. Men and women are in the business of reproducing, and both bring to the table invaluable resources towards this common goal. Without either sex there would be no reproduction. Having said that, the sex that contributes the scarcest resources should be most valued and expensive, while the other should be correspondingly cheap.

Superficially both sexes might appear equally scarce, given that our sex ratio is 1:1. In other words to every woman there corresponds roughly one man. But this is not the end of the story. The relevant ratio here is that of the reproductive cells, or gametes, that each sex offers. The gametes of the woman - her eggs - fuse with the gametes of the man - his sperm cells - to create the first cell of every future baby. When it comes to the gametes of each sex the quantitative disparity is mind boggling. Women are born with a limited supply of eggs that are stored in their ovaries and from sexual maturity will start releasing one egg a month until menopause. The average woman will release around 400 mature eggs in her lifetime. But men create many millions of sperm cells daily. An average load of male sperm - the ejaculate- can contain between 100-500 million sperm cells, and a healthy male can ejaculate several times a day, releasing several hundred billion sperm cells over his lifetime.

Equally impressive is the sex difference in the energy investment in each gamete. The male sperm cell is little more than a swimming string of DNA with a tail - it is so basic and tiny that a man can produce a thousand of these cells per second. In comparison the female egg is a gigantic, nutrient-rich ball that will supply the DNA with all the precious materials it needs to begin building the new organism. The monthly maturation, release and discarding - if no fertilization occurs - of this single egg is a major physiological event, dependent on the interplay of various hormones. These affect the woman's body so profoundly that her monthly ovulatory cycle can be reliably tracked by monitoring the changes they induce to her body temperature.

But with these physiological differences we have not yet scratched the surface of how cheap men are. What matters even more than reproductive physiology is the difference in the supply of time, energy and resources that each sex commits to raising the child until it can look after itself. Here the differences are even more staggering than the billion-fold disparity in gametes. From the moment a woman conceives she is bound to carry the fetus for nine months. This is her absolute minimum time commitment, even if she then decides to dump the baby on somebody else’s lap and run away, something that women rarely do anyway. After birth a further few months or years of breastfeeding will follow, all provided again exclusively by the woman. At least one to two years of a woman’s reproductive lifespan will be tied up, during which time she will not be able to conceive another child.[5] The man, on the other hand, does not commit to anything. Historically, there has been nothing to stop him from simply walking away from a pregnant partner. During the nine months when she will be stuck with his baby he can philander and impregnate other women. Later, when the woman is breastfeeding and caring for his baby, there is again nothing to stop him from further philandering. In theory, a man could have a practically endless number of children during a period in which a woman can only have one.

In the language of biology, women provide more parental investment than men. Parental investment is defined as any investment by the parent in a child that increases that child’s chances of survival but at the expense of the parent’s ability to invest in other children, either present or future.[6] A man who has casual sex with a woman expends practically no parental investment on the potential child. His only investment is a cheap batch of sperm that he can fully replace in a couple of days. A woman who agrees to - or is tricked into - casual sex risks pregnancy, with the massive investment of her egg, nine months of gestation, months or years of breastfeeding and decades of child-rearing. For one or two years she will not even be able to conceive another child, and every future child she produces will have to compete for her limited attention and resources with this child. Add to this her limited reproductive window, from puberty to her early forties, and it becomes apparent that every act of intercourse a woman consents to could, potentially, lead to massive parental investment. Women are therefore the limiting factor in human reproduction, and men have to compete amongst themselves to gain access to them. 

As the sex with the higher parental investment, women have evolved two fundamental strategies for dealing with cheap men who are all too keen to provide their abundant sperm. First, they are difficult. They like to take their time and make sure the man who is courting them is sincerely interested and will not simply abandon them after sex. The whole process of pre-sex courtship, the text messages, the phone calls, the candle-lit dinners and multiple dates, the entire getting to know each other better, is initiated and controlled by women. The man is the seller, the one who will hardly ever turn down the opportunity for sex because it is too soon or he doesn’t feel ready yet. On the relatively rare occasions when women are open to quick and easy sex, they have evolved another strategy for dealing with an abundance of cheap sperm providers: they are picky. They will only have sex with someone they are genuinely attracted to. Compare that to yourself when you are in the mood for sex: are there that many women you would turn down?

Psychologists’ studies confirm what parental investment theory predicts, and what we are all familiar with through personal experience.[7] In study after study women report less interest in short-term sexual relationships (like one-night stands) compared to men. They also report less actual seeking out of these types of relationships. When asked about the minimum requirements in a potential short-term mate, women maintain the same high standards they set for a long-term partner, but men’s standards plummet. When asked to indicate the number of different sexual partners they would ideally desire in any given time period, like the next month, year, decade or across their lifetime, women also invariably report lower numbers.

In a pair of classic experiments, psychologists Russell Clark and Elaine Hatfield employed a small group of psychology students – the confederates - to approach students of the opposite sex on the campus of Florida State University. The confederates told the students they approached that they found them attractive and then asked one of the following three questions: a) Would you go out with me tonight? b) Would you come over to my apartment tonight? or c) Would you go to bed with me tonight? The replies of the students who were directly asked to sleep with the confederate were revealing. While 75% of men agreed to have sex with the confederate, exactly 0% of women did. Consistent with these figures were men and women’s emotional reactions:

In general, the female experimenters reported that men were at ease with the request. They would say Why do we have to wait until tonight? or I cannot tonight, but tomorrow would be fine. The men that said No even gave apologies, i.e., I'm married or I'm going with someone. In contrast, the women's response to the intimate requests from males was You've got to be kidding, or What is wrong with you? Leave me alone.[8]

Similar studies have since been conducted in France, Denmark and Germany. They all replicated the massive sex difference found in Clark and Hatfield’s experiments.[9] Combining data from hundreds of participants from all four countries, around 1% of women agree to an unsolicited sexual invitation from a member of the opposite sex compared to 50% for men.[10] This difference in the desire for casual sex is one of the largest sex differences in all of psychology.[11]

Having said this, there are many instances where men offer substantial parental investment. In all human societies the predominant mating arrangement is the monogamous pair bond, where a man and women form a long-term relationship with the explicit or implicit goal of raising children.[12] So we know for a fact that men are often happy – and sometimes not so happy - to go with a woman for the long ride and invest in their children. Precisely because they are offering something more than just cheap sperm, namely years of sexual exclusivity, energy and resources, men are also picky in these scenarios and will generally not settle for the first woman that says yes. They will only enter a long-term relationship if they feel the woman is worth their time. The degree to which he is inclined towards long-term relationships at the expense of short-term sex varies from one man to the next. As we will

Reviews for Hack Your Mating

[AL3X39 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Not the least helpful, way far from what i expected.