Pablo Fernandez

There’s this bit of popular knowledge: “Men find women that make the first move unattractive”. I would like to challenge it because I don’t think we have data to believe it’s true and it’s not a positive belief either.

Let’s start with the latter. If that is true, then, dating as a woman sucks (which as a side effect makes dating as a man suck but I’m focusing on women right now). Imagine going to a restaurant, looking at the menu, finding what you want and not being able to do anything about it. The waiter will come with random dishes and you can say no or yes, but not request the one you want. You can try batting your eyelids at the dish you want, but that’s it.

Let’s move on to the main part of the argument. Do men really find active women unattractive?

I have a few female friends that are close enough to confide in me about their dating shenanigans. They often tell me that when they tried taking an active role and approaching men their dating is extremely unsuccessful. It’s like being active somehow made them very unattractive. The problem I find with this statement is that they are comparing approaching more or less random people against being approached by group that self selected for finding them attractive.

They say things such as “I messaged 10 guys and got no response” when it’s not uncommon for a man to message 500 women to get around ten responses of which 9.9 disappear in the middle of a conversation without even saying goodbye.

The truth is that the dating game is brutal and if you take an active role you’ll get constantly rejected. The unattractive people, that is, the people that rarely get approached by someone (maybe 90% of men and 10% of women) have no other option than to deal with it or be alone.

I would be interested in knowing other people’s experiences and if someone knows of proper science done around this I’d like to know about it. Furthermore if some women would like to attempt some home made science, I’d like to participate.