Hack your mating: An evolutionary psychologist’s guide to a life of sexual abundance

193 Pages·2018·1.89 MB·English

by  Tony Vakirtzis

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: [email protected]
Old Marston Press
ISBN: 978-1-9996301-1-9
Cover design by ciusan.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