Dating guru 34

Seduction community

The seduction community, also known as the pick-up artist or PUA community, is a movement of men whose goal is seduction and sexual success with/access to women. Members of the community often call themselves pickup artists (PUA). The community exists through Internet newsletters and weblogs. marketing (e. g. banner ads. seminars, one-on-one coaching), forums and groups, as well as over a hundred local clubs, known as "lairs". [ 1 ]

Contents

History [ edit ]

The modern seduction movement dates to 1970, with the publication of How To Pick Up Girls! by Eric Weber, credited as the first modern pickup artist. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] However, one self-described "picker-upper of women" preceding Weber was rational emotive psychotherapist Albert Ellis, who wrote The Art of Erotic Seduction . a how-to guide for men that encouraged them to meet women through the "pickup," with Roger Conway in 1967. [ 8 ] Ellis claimed he had been practicing seducing female strangers since he overcame his fear of approaching them through "in-vivo desensitization" in Bronx Botanical Garden in the 1930s. [ 9 ] The 1970s and 1980s saw independent authors and teachers, but no organized community. The seduction community itself originated with Ross Jeffries and his students. In the late 1980s, Jeffries taught workshops, promoted a collection of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) techniques called "speed seduction" (SS), and published a short book of his techniques, How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed . [ 10 ] [ 11 ] Other gurus established themselves in roughly the same era, but lacked contacts with each other. In 1994, Lewis De Payne, then a student of Jeffries, founded the newsgroup alt. seduction. fast (ASF), [ 12 ] which marked the birth of the community per se. [ 10 ] This then spawned a network of other Internet discussion forums, email lists, blogs, and sites where seduction techniques could be exchanged. [ 10 ] [ 13 ]

The original alt. seduction. fast became overwhelmed with spam. and a group called "Learn the Skills Corporation" developed a moderated alternative known as "Moderated ASF" (commonly "mASF"). [ citation needed ] During the same period, in the late 1990s, Clifford Lee began his Cliff's List Seduction Letter as a central independent voice of the community. [ 14 ]

Other seduction teachers emerged with competing methods, and became known within this community as "seduction gurus" or "gurus". [ 15 ] The first commercially successful seduction/pick up book was a manual by Tariq Nasheed (also known as King Flex) entitled The Art Of Mackin . which was released in 2000. Tariq Nasheed went on to write several other seduction/dating books such as The Mack Within: The Holy Book Of Game and The Elite Way:10 Rules Men Must Know In Order To Deal With Women .

The community was brought to greater mainstream awareness with the 1999 drama film Magnolia . in which Tom Cruise portrayed a charismatic yet embittered and emotionally troubled pickup guru who was loosely modeled on Ross Jeffries. [ 16 ] In 2005, journalist Neil Strauss wrote The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists . an expose of the seduction community. The Game reached the New York Times Bestseller List. and popularized pickup and seduction to a broader audience. [ 17 ] The community was further publicized with the television show The Pick Up Artist (2007–2008) on VH1 .

Within the community, seduction lairs are underground meeting groups for men devoted to the study of seduction as it is taught in the seduction community. Lairs first began as study groups soon after Ross Jeffries released his first products and began teaching sometime in the early 90s. [ 18 ] Hundreds of lairs now exist worldwide. [ 19 ] A "lair" typically involves two elements: an online forum and group meetings. These elements are used as resources for men who want to learn to become well-versed in how to successfully attract women. [ 20 ]

Concepts [ edit ]

Supporters of this community typically believe that the conventional dating advice for men is fatally flawed. For example, they reject the notion that men should attempt to woo women by spending money on them (e. g. buying drinks, presents, jewelry), calling it supplication .

Many members of the seduction community work on their "game" (seduction skills) by improving their understanding of psychology, their confidence and self-esteem (termed "inner game"), and their social skills and physical appearance (physical fitness, fashion sense, grooming) ("outer game"). Many members of the community believe that one's "game" is refined through regular practice, [ 21 ] with the idea that the abilities needed to interact in this way with women can be improved.

The seduction community has a unique set of acronyms and jargon for describing male–female dynamics and social interaction. [ 15 ] For example, 'AFC' ("average frustrated chump") is a term coined by Ross Jeffries to describe males who are typically clueless and incompetent with women. [ 10 ] Alpha-Male Of the Group (AMOG): a reference to a competing male, who is usually either befriended by the PUA, or, if necessary, ridiculed.

The community claims that the above-mentioned concepts derive from scientific disciplines, such as the concept of social proof from the psychology of influence. and various concepts from sociobiology and evolutionary psychology (such as the term "alpha male "). Up until recently there has been very little in the way of direct scientific proof that learning these techniques can create success with women, aside from a study by German researcher Andres Baranowski, [ 22 ] who trained participants in these techniques - and found that this training did improve participants skills in dating.

Practices [ edit ]

In The Game . Neil Strauss documents various practices that occur in the seduction community. Members of the community believe in achieving success with women through (what they believe to be) scientific and empirical means, rather than by relying on good looks or intuitive instinct, or by following societal courtship conventions. The practice of going out with the purpose of meeting women is known as "sarging", a term coined by Ross Jeffries. after his cat "Sarge". A pickup artist can "sarge" alone, or with a wingman. [ 23 ]

"Negging" has been described as the practice of giving a woman a backhanded compliment such as "nice nails -- are they real?", to weaken her confidence and therefore render her more vulnerable to seduction. [ 24 ] Conor Friedersdorf lambasted the use of negging by pick-up artists, but admitted that, based on his observations, negging did appear to be effective at generating attraction from some women. [ 25 ] [ 26 ] [ 27 ] [ 28 ] [ 29 ] A 2009 science study found that men giving negative attention to "high social anxiety" women produced more positive behavior in the women than if the men treated them nicely. [ 30 ]

"Pawning" is trading or discarding an unwanted woman as proof of the PUA's own social value, and "going caveman" is escalating physical contact while reducing verbal contact). [ 31 ]

One constellation of PUA techniques, called "Last Minute Resistance" tactics (LMR tactics), is designed to convince a woman to have sex after she has indicated that she doesn't want to. [ 32 ]

Approaching and opening [ edit ]

Pickup artists generally assume the mindset that women are passive and will not initiate contact, requiring men to begin any interaction by approaching them, but many have also cultivated a sensitivity to direct and indirect signals of possible sexual interest .

Members of the seduction community often practice approaching and opening repetitively; some have done thousands of approaches. Strauss describes a pickup artist who did 125 approaches in one day. [ 33 ]

Criticism [ edit ]

Feminist BDSM writer and activist Clarisse Thorn. author of Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser: Long Interviews with Hideous Men. criticizes the PUA community as frequently "absurd and sexist," "pushy and problematic" and encouraging adversarial gender roles. She argues PUA tactics are worth understanding because they are not unique to the PUA community, but instead represent society-wide beliefs and patterns and strategies of human sexual behaviour. [ 32 ] The UCLA Center for the Study of Women argues that PUA culture is misogynist, and exists on a continuum of sexist behaviours and attitudes that includes rape and murder. [ 43 ]

After 48-year-old systems analyst George Sodini killed three women and himself in the 2009 Collier Township shooting. media asked whether he had been influenced by his involvement in the PUA community. [ 44 ]

In 2013, after 29,000 people signed a petition opposing Reddit blogger Ken Hoinsky 's Kickstarter campaign to raise $2,000 to print his PUA guide Above the Game: A Guide to Getting Awesome with Women, Kickstarter shut it down, saying the guide encouraged misogynistic behaviour. [ 45 ] [ 46 ] [ 47 ]

Media coverage [ edit ]

The seduction community has received increased media attention, [ 48 ] [ 49 ] [ 50 ] [ 51 ] since the publication of Neil Strauss ' article on the community in The New York Times . [ 10 ] and his bestselling memoir The Game . Response to the seduction community has been varied; it has been called misogynistic. and a review of The Game in the San Francisco Chronicle characterized the community as "a puerile cult of sexual conquest," and calls its tactics "sinister" and "pathetic." [ 51 ] [ 52 ] According to the review, "if women in the book are sometimes treated as a commodity, they come out looking better than the men, who can be downright loathsome—and show themselves eventually to be pretty sad, dysfunctional characters."

Feminists tend to be critical of the seduction community. Beatrix Campbell has stated that The Game "sexually objectifies women," arguing that "Nowhere from its description do you get a sense of men being helped to be human in an easy and agreeable way. it's not about having any rapport or relationship. the only thing that will help them in relationships is empathy and liking women." [ 53 ]

According to an article in Eye Weekly . some feminists believe that pickup "isn't just cheesy; it's offensive." [ 54 ] The article cites a proposal put forward by a feministblogs. org writer as an alternative to the formula used by expert PUAs: "Shake my hand. [Say] 'Hi, my name is. ' Treat me like a human being. Avoid seeing women as conquests and men as competition."

An article in the Houston Press claimed that the seduction community "isn't the lechfest it might sound like." The article quotes the webmaster of fastseduction. com defending the community: "It's no more deceptive than push-up bras or heels or going to the gym to work out…This isn't just a game of words and seduction, it's an overall life improvement." [ 55 ] Strauss says, "I really think all of these routines and manipulations are just a way for a guy to get his foot in the door so that if a woman connects with him, she can still choose him," and that seduction techniques "can be used for good or evil!" [ 21 ] [ 50 ] He argues that "women are incredibly intuitive—the creepy guys with bad intentions don't do nearly as well as the guys who love and respect women." [ 51 ]

Several writers describe observing men in the seduction community first-hand. Some women recount experiences with men they believed to be pickup artists who tried to "pick them up," and some men recount trying out pickup techniques. A columnist for The Independent describes a negative experience with a man she believed was a pickup artist and used a lot of "negs" on her: "The problem is that some guys clearly don't know when to quit." [ 56 ]

An article in San Francisco Magazine recounts the experience the blogger "Dolly," who is the "author of the popular sex blog The Truth about Cocks and Dolls had with the seduction community. According to the article, Dolly was:

[. ] put off by PUAs at first. But after she met more, including two from San Francisco, she wrote a letter to the Village Voice defending them, in response to the paper’s negative article on the subject in March. “PUAs try to create a fun, positive, and exciting experience for the woman,” Dolly wrote. “The credo many follow is ‘Leave her better than you found her.’ What’s so bad about that? That they want to get laid, too? Guess what? Guys have always wanted sex and will continue to want sex. You can’t fault them for finally discovering methods that are successful.

After spending three days immersed in a Mystery Method Corp (now Love Systems ) seminar, Gene Weingarten expressed his uneasiness about "a step by step tutorial for men in how to pick up women, make them comfortable in your presence, and bed them, ideally within seven hours of your first meeting" and wondered aloud, "Is there something inherently wrong with the notion of seduction as a classroom-taught skill, complete with a long hierarchy of 'lines' that work, seemingly spontaneous topics of conversation that are anything but spontaneous, tricks for seeming 'vulnerable', and tips on how to behave so as to deliver subtle but effective nonverbal inducements to intimacy?" [ 58 ]

For an article for the Times Online . Hugo Rifkind participated in a seminar by Neil Strauss. Rifkind describes initially struggling with seduction techniques, eventually learning to attract women's interest, and then feeling guilty. Rifkind writes, "After a little more practice, my 'game' is improving dramatically. I can open with fluency, and there's an injection of confidence which comes from knowing exactly what you are going to say next." When he attracts a woman's attention, "she is—quite honestly—looking at me like I'm the most fascinating person she's ever met. As a human being and, perhaps more crucially, as somebody with a girlfriend, I feel like absolute scum."

Commercialization [ edit ]

The media attention and rapid growth of the seduction community has led to commercialization and competition. Teachers of seduction tactics sell workshops, books, e-books. DVDs. and CDs over the internet. In The Game . Strauss describes the competition between seduction gurus. In The Journal, teaching of these seduction methods is shown by way of 50+ examples.

Academic research [ edit ]

An academic paper on the community, published in 2012 by Eric C. Hendriks in the journal Cultural Analysis . details the value system guiding successful members of the Seduction Community based on an international study including participant observation of bootcamp and "lair" meetings in Germany." [ 59 ] The article argues that the values of successful practitioners of the "Venusian Arts" are informed by an intertwining of "hedonistic goals and diffused forms of innerworldly asceticism ." [ 59 ] According to the article, the hedonistic goal of sexual satisfaction interacts in a complex fashion with a set of "disciplinarian and ascetic values," [ 59 ] and the author stresses that these disciplinarian and ascetic values are central to the value system of performant practitioners, even though the marketing of seduction gurus often promises an easy, effortless "quick fix."

A 2009 study found that social proof. or "preselection" as it is often termed in the PUA community, does appear to be a valid concept. In the study, 59% of women expressed interest when presented with a single man. When shown that the man was in a relationship with another woman, the number jumped to 90%. [ 60 ]

Research by Nathan Oesch of the University of Oxford Department of Experimental Psychology confirmed attraction and seduction principles, as described in Strauss' books on the subject, do have a factual basis in social, physiological and evolutionary psychology. [ 61 ]

Dataclysm: The data guru for a popular dating site explains what men and women want from a mate

Up where the world is steep, like in the Andes, people use funicular railroads to get where they need to go — a pair of cable cars connected by a pulley far up the hill. The weight of the one car going down pulls the other up; the two vessels travel in counterbalance.

I’ve learned that that’s what being a parent is like. If the years bring me low, they raise my daughter, and, please, so be it. I surrender gladly to the passage, of course, especially as each new moment gone by is another I’ve lived with her, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the days when my hair was actually all brown and my skin free of weird spots. My girl is two, and I can tell you that nothing makes the arc of time more clear than the creases in the back of your hand as it teaches plump little fingers to count: one, two, tee.

But some guy having a baby and getting wrinkles is not news. You can start with whatever the Oil of Olay marketing department is running up the pole this week (as I’m writing, it’s the idea of “colour correcting” your face with a creamy beige paste that is either mud from the foothills of Alsace or the very essence of bullshit) and work your way back to myths of Hera’s jealous rage. People have been obsessed with getting older, and with getting uglier because of it, for as long as there’ve been people and obsession and ugliness. “Death and taxes” are our two eternals, right? And depending on the next U. S. government shutdown, the latter is looking less and less reliable. So there you go.

When I was a teenager — and it shocks me to realize I was closer then to my daughter’s age than to my current 38 — I was really into punk rock, especially pop-punk. The bands were basically snottier and less proficient versions of Green Day. When I go back and listen to them now, the whole phenomenon seems supernatural to me: grown men brought together in trios and quartets by some unseen force to whine about girlfriends and what other people are eating. But at the time, I thought these bands were the shit. And because they were too cool to have posters, I had to settle for arranging their album covers and flyers on my bedroom wall. My parents have long since moved — twice, in fact. I’m pretty sure my old bedroom is now someone else’s attic, and I have no idea where any of the paraphernalia I collected is. Or really what most of it even looked like. I can just remember it and smile, and wince.

Today, an 18-year-old tacks a picture on his “wall,” and that electronic wall will never come down. Not only will his 38-year-old self be able to go back, pick through the detritus, and ask “What was I thinking?,” so can the rest of us, and so can researchers.

Moreover, they can do it for all people, not just one guy. And, more still, they can connect that 18 th year to what came before and what’s still to come, because the wall, covered in totems, follows him from that bedroom in his parents’ house to his dorm room to his first apartment to his girlfriend’s place to his honeymoon, and, yes, to his daughter’s nursery. Where he will proceed to paper it over in a billion updates of her eating mush.

A new parent is perhaps most sensitive to the milestones of getting older. It’s almost all you talk about with other people, and you get actual metrics at the doctor’s office every few months. But the milestones keep coming long after babycenter. com and the pediatrician quit with the reminders. It’s just that we stop keeping track. Computers, however, have nothing better to do; keeping track is their only job. They don’t lose the scrapbook or travel, or get drunk or grow senile, or even blink. They just sit there and remember. The myriad phases of our lives, once gone but to memory and the occasional shoebox, are becoming permanent, and as daunting as that may be to everyone with a drunk selfie on Instagram, the opportunity for understanding, if handled carefully, is self-evident.

What I’ve just described, the wall and the long accumulation of a life, is what sociologists call longitudinal data — data from following the same people, over time. Also, I was speculating about the research of the future. We don’t have these capabilities quite yet because the Internet, as a pervasive human record, is still too young. As hard as it is to believe, even Facebook, touchstone and warhorse that it is, has only been big for about six years. It’s not even in middle school!

Information this deep is still something we’re building toward, literally, one day at a time. In 10 or 20 years, we’ll be able to answer questions like … well, for one, how much does it mess up a person to have every moment of her life, since infancy, posted for everyone else to see? But we’ll also know so much more about how friends grow apart or how new ideas percolate through the mainstream. I can see the long-term potential in the rows and columns of my databases, and we can all see it in, for example, the promise of Facebook’s Timeline feature: for the passage of time, data creates a new kind of fullness, if not exactly a new science.

Even now, in certain situations, we can find an excellent proxy, a sort of flash­forward to the possibilities. We can take groups of people at different points in their lives, compare them, and get a rough draft of life’s arc.

This approach won’t work with music tastes, for example, because music itself also evolves through time, so the analysis has no control. But there are fixed universals that can support it, and, in the data I have, the nexus of beauty, sex, and age is one of them.

Here, the possibility already exists to mark milestones, as well as lay bare vanities and vulnerabilities that were perhaps till now just shades of truth. So doing, we will approach a topic that has consumed authors, painters, philosophers and poets since those vocations existed, perhaps with less art (though there is an art to it), but with a new and glinting precision. As usual, the good stuff lies in the distance between thought and action, and I’ll show you how we find it.

***

I’ll start with the opinions of women — all the trends below are true across my sexual data sets, but for specificity’s sake, I’ll use numbers from OkCupid, the dating web site that I co-founded. Figure 1 lists, for a woman, the age of men she finds most attractive. If I’ve arranged the data unusually, you’ll see in a second why.

Reading from the top, we see that 20- and 21-year-old women prefer 23-year-old guys; 22-year-old women like men who are 24, and so on down through the years to women at 50, who we see rate 46-year-olds the highest. This isn’t survey data, this is data built from tens of millions of preferences expressed in the online act of finding a date, and even from just following along the first few entries, the gist of the Figure is clear: A woman wants a guy to be roughly as old as she is. Pick an age on the left under 40, and the number beside it is always very close.

The broad trend comes through better when I let lateral space reflect the progression of the values, as in Figure 2. That dotted diagonal is the “age parity’’ line, where the male and female years would be equal. It’s not a canonical math thing, just something I overlaid as a guide for your eye. (Often there is an intrinsic geometry to a situation — it was the first science for a reason and we’ll take advantage wherever possible.)

This particular line brings out two transitions, which coincide with big birthdays. The first pivot point is at 30, where the trend of the numbers on the right — the ages of the men — crosses below the line, never to cross back. This is the data’s way of saying that until 30, a woman prefers slightly older guys; afterward, she likes them slightly younger. Then at 40, the progression breaks free of the diagonal, going practically straight down for nine years.

That is to say, a woman’s tastes appear to hit a wall. Or a man’s looks fall off a cliff, however you want to think about it. If we want to pick the point where a man’s sexual appeal has reached its limit, it’s there: 40.

The two perspectives (of the woman doing the rating and of the man being rated) are two halves of a whole. As a woman gets older, her standards evolve, and from the man’s side, the rough l: l movement of the numbers implies that as he matures, the expectations of his female peers mature as well, practically year-for-year. He gets older, and their viewpoint accommodates him. The wrinkles, the nose hair, the renewed commitment to cargo shorts — these are all somehow satisfactory, or at least offset by other virtues.

Compare this to the free fall of scores going the other way, from men to women.

Figure 3 makes a statement as stark as its own negative space. A woman’s at her best when she’s in her very early twenties. Period. And really my plot doesn’t show that strongly enough. The four highest-rated female ages are 20, 21, 22 and 23 for every group of guys but one. You can see the general pattern in Figure 4, where I’ve overlaid shading for the top two quartiles (that is, top half) of ratings. I’ve also added some female ages as numbers in black on the bottom horizontal to help you navigate.

Again, the geometry speaks: The male pattern runs much deeper than just a preference for 20-year-olds. And after he hits 30, the latter half of our age range (that is, women over 35) might as well not exist. Younger is better, and youngest is best of all, and if “over the hill” means the beginning of a person’s decline, a straight woman is over the hill as soon as she’s old enough to drink.

Of course, another way to put this focus on youth is that males’ expectations never grow up. A fifty-year-old man’s idea of what’s hot is roughly the same as a college kid’s, at least with age as the variable under consideration.

If anything, men in their 20s are the ones who are more willing to date older women. That pocket of middling ratings in the upper right of Figure 4, that’s your “cougar” bait, basically. Hikers just out enjoying a nice day, then bam.

In a mathematical sense, a man’s age and his sexual aims are independent variables: The former changes while the latter never does. I call this Wooderson’s law, in honor of its most famous proponent, Matthew McConaughey’s character from Dazed and Confused . “That’s what I like about these high school girls. I get older, they stay the same age.”

Unlike Wooderson himself, what men claim they want is quite different from the private voting data we’ve just seen. The ratings described above were submitted without any specific prompt beyond “Judge this person.” But when you ask men outright to select the ages of women they’re looking for, you get different results.

The gray space in Figure 5 is what men tell us they want when asked. Since I don’t think that anyone is intentionally misleading us when they give OkCupid their preferences — there’s little incentive to do that, since all you get then is a site that gives you what you know you don’t want — I see this as a statement of what men imagine they’re supposed to desire, versus what they actually do. The gap between the two ideas just grows over the years, although the tension seems to resolve in a kind of pathetic compromise when it’s time to stop voting and act, as you’ll see.

Figure 6, identifies the age with the greatest density of contact attempts. These most-messaged ages are described by the darkest gray squares drifting along the left-hand edge of the larger swath. Those three dark verticals in the graph’s lower half show the jumps in a man’s self-concept as he approaches middle age. You can almost see the gears turning. At 44, he’s comfortable approaching a woman as young as 35. Then, one year later … he thinks better of it. While a nine-year age difference is fine, 10 years is apparently too much.

It’s this kind of calculated no-man’s-land — the balance between what you want, what you say, and what you do — that real romance has to occupy: No matter how people might vote in private or what they prefer in the abstract, there aren’t many 50-year-old men successfully pursuing 20­year-old women. For one thing, social conventions work against it. For another, dating requires reciprocity: What one person wants is only half of the equation.

When it comes to women seizing the initiative and reaching out to men, because of the female-to-male attraction ratio we saw at the beginning of the chapter (l year: l year), plus the nonphysical motivations that push women toward older men — economics, for example — women send more, rather than fewer, messages to a man as he gets older, up until the early 30s. From there, the amount of contact declines, but no faster than the general number of available females itself is shrinking.

Think about it like this: Imagine you could take a typical 20-year-old guy, who’s just starting to date as an adult (definition: no SOLO beer cups present during at least one of courtship/consummation/breakup), and you could somehow note all the women who would be interested in him. If you could then track the whole lot over time, the main way he’ll lose options from that set is when some of them just stop being single because they’ve paired off with someone else. In fact, his total “interested” pool would actually gain women, because as he gets older, and presumably richer and more successful, those qualities draw younger women in. In any event, his age, of itself, doesn’t hurt him. Over the first two decades of his dating life, as he and the women in his pool mature, the ones who are still available will find him as desirable an option as they did when they were all 20.

If you could do the same thing for a typical woman at 20, you’d get a different story. Over the years, she, too, would lose men from her pool to things like marriage, but she would also lose options to time itself as the years passed: Fewer and fewer of the remaining single men would find her attractive. Her dating pool is like a can with two holes — it drains on the double.

The number of single men shrinks rapidly by age: According to the U. S. Census, there are 10-million single men ages 20 to 24, but only 5-million at 30 to 34, and just 3.5-million at 40 to 44. When you overlay the preference patterns we see above to those shrinking demographics, you can get a sense of how a woman’s real options change over time.

For a woman at 20, the actual shape of the dating pool is pictured in Figure 7. Her peers (guys in their early twenties) form the biggest component, and the numbers slope off rapidly — 30-year-old men, for example, make up only a small part. They are less likely to actually contact someone so young, despite their privately expressed interest, and in addition many men already have partnered off by that age. By the time the woman is 50, the men left (and still interested), are presented on the same scale in Figure 8. It’s Bridget Jones in charts.

Comparing the areas, for every 100 men interested in that 20-year-old, there are only nine looking for someone 30 years older. Figure 9 shows the full progression of charts, rendered from a woman’s perspective for each of the ages 20 to 50.

So often in my line of work I’ll see two individuals, both alone but for whatever reason not connecting. In this case, for this facet of the experience, it’s two whole groups of people searching for each other at cross-purposes. Women want men to age with them. And men always head toward youth. A 32-year-old woman will sign up with a dating site, set her age-preference filters at 28-35, and begin to browse. That 35-year-old man will come along, set his filters to 24-40, and yet rarely contact anyone over 29. Neither finds what they are looking for.

You could say they’re like two ships passing in the night, but that’s not quite right. The men do seem at sea, pulled to some receding horizon. But in my mind, I see the women still on solid ground, ashore, just watching them disappear.

National Post

Excerpted from Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking). Copyright © 2014 Christian Rudder. Published by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited a Penguin Random House Company. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

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Dating Advice: How Important Is Physical Attraction In A Relationship?

Imagine you meet the guy or girl of your dreams. This person is funny, smart, likes the same things as you and is the biggest sweetheart ever. Only catch? They’re kind of lacking in the looks department. Do you let your lack of physical attraction ruin the relationship… Or does it not matter to you?

Basically, we’re asking: are looks important? Is physical attraction a huge part of a relationship, or is that just superficial? We saw this topic in the gURL. com message boards, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Read what these girls had to say about looks in a relationship, and then let us know what you think.

(L)iveYourLife replied and said:

I couldn’t date somebody who I wasn’t physically attracted to. Looks matter, and sex is an important part of a healthy relationship. Keep looking and don’t settle for someone who doesn’t meet your standards!

luckybiatch replied and said:

It’s important and I do agree with the above gURLS, however when I first met my boyfriend, I wasn’t necessarily physically attracted to him. I believe girls, including me at the time, have standards higher held than girls in the past would, because of how media is portraying beauty. The more I got to know my boyfriend, the more physically attractive he became in my eyes. Not even a short while after beginning to date, I found him sexy and handsome (and his attractiveness just increases even to this day). So I believe even though you’re not physically attracted to this guy, I bet if you give it time, you might actually become more attracted. In my opinion, the personality of an individual makes them better looking. Looks can only last so long (we all age), but personality lasts a lifetime.

So what do we think? The fact is, no matter how shallow it sounds, physical attraction is important in a relationship. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t date someone unless they're a male model… All it means is that you have to be a little attracted to the person in order for there to be sexual chemistry.

The stranger-than-fiction true story of Swami Vijayananda.

One sweltering day in the summer of 2008, near Hardwar, India, the pilgrimage city at the headwaters of the Ganges, an incongruous scene unfolded. Amidst the dhoti-clad men and sari-clad women, two Hasidic men from Israel, with long peyot and black kippahs, strode quickly through the crowded streets. When they reached their destination — the ashram of Anandamayi-ma, India’s most adulated woman saint of the 20 th century — they hesitated at the entrance to the courtyard. Idolatrous statues dotted the courtyard. As religious Jews, they wondered whether they were permitted to enter.

Swami Vijayananda with devotees

Standing there, they saw the guru, Swami Vijayananda, garbed in the ochre robes of a monk, exit from one of the buildings. He took his seat on a stone bench in order to receive the long line of waiting devotees. One by one, they approached the 93-year-old guru, bowed on their knees, and took the dust of his feet — a Hindu gesture of honor, whereby one touches the guru’s feet with one’s hand, and then one’s own forehead. Each devotee had barely a minute of the guru’s attention to ask or utter a few words. Then, still kneeling, the devotee found a place on the ground some distance away to continue to bask in the presence of the guru.

The two Hasidic men were Eliezer Botzer and his friend Natti, heads of the Bayit Yehudi . Jewish Home, a chain of Jewish centers situated throughout India in locations such as Hardwar and Goa, where thousands of post-army Israelis congregate. Although Eliezer and Natti spent a lot of time in India, standing there at the entrance to Anandamayi-ma’s ashram they were as out of place as a klezmer clarinet at a sitar concert.

After a few minutes, the guru noticed the two religious Jews. The next devotee at the head of the line was about to approach the guru, but he stopped him. He gestured to the two attendants who flanked him to block the line. Then the guru beckoned to the two religious Jews to come to him. While the long line of devotees, many of them Europeans, looked on in surprise, Eliezer and Natti directly approached the guru. No bowing, no taking the dust of his feet, no kneeling on the ground. The guru motioned for them to sit beside him on the bench.

Looking directly at the guru, Eliezer asked, “I heard that you’re a Jew. Is it true?”

Eliezer’s question was different than that of the devotees who asked Swami Vijayananda about the purpose of life or the way to higher consciousness. Looking directly at the guru, Eliezer asked, “I heard that you’re a Jew. Is it true?”

The guru smiled. Yes, he had been born into a Hasidic family in France. Although his grandparents were Lubliner Hasidim, his parents were more modern, but still fully observant. He had gone to Heder (Talmud Torah) and had been raised with all the devout trappings of Judaism. In his twenties, he told Eliezer and Natti, he abandoned Jewish observance. He became a doctor. Then the Holocaust descended. He told them about his Holocaust experiences, and about how he gave his tefillin away to a religious fellow because he wasn’t using them anyway.

“Why did you come to India?” Eliezer asked him.

The guru related that, after the war, he was on a ship bound for the nascent State of Israel. A woman on the ship asked him why he was going from one war to another. “Where should I go?” he asked her. She suggested India, a place of peace, with no anti-Semitism.

In India, in 1951, at the age of 36, he met Anandamayi-ma. Already at that time, hundreds of thousands of Indians venerated her not only as an enlightened soul, but as an Incarnation of the Divine Mother. He became her faithful disciple, taking on the monastic name of Swami Vijayananda. After her passing in 1982, many Indians and Westerners gravitated to him as their new guru.

Looking at Eliezer and Natti, he said, “There are two levels of spirituality: a lower level and a higher level. The lower level is religion; the higher level is the recognition that everything is one.”

Eliezer looked back at him and rejoined: “There are two levels of love: a higher level and a lower level. There is love for every person in the world, and there is love for your own wife and family. If you’re not able to love your own family, your love of the whole world is fake.”

“I agree,” nodded the guru.

“So,” continued Eliezer, “You’re Jewish. Before you go out and love the whole world, you should practice loving those who are closest to you, the Jewish People.”

The guru laughed. That started their discussion. As the attendants looked on nervously and the many devotees in the line fidgeted restlessly, the guru and the Hasids sparred back and forth for a long time. “He was trying to show us that we were wrong,” remembers Eliezer, “that religion is not the Truth.”

With neither side conceding to the other, Eliezer suddenly switched gears. He asked, “What did your mother call you when you were a child?”

Tears came to the guru’s eyes, and he murmured, “Avrimka. My name was Avraham Yitzhak. My mother called me Avrimka.”

Eliezer continued to probe: “Do you remember a Shabbos table when you were a child?”

From out of hazy depths 70 years dormant, the guru started to sing A Woman of Valor, from beginning to end with tears streaming from his closed eyes.

The guru closed his eyes. Then, from out of hazy depths 70 years dormant, he started to sing “ Eishes Hayil . A Woman of Valor,” the song sung before Kiddush at every Shabbos dinner. With tears streaming from his closed eyes, he sang the entire song, from beginning to end. Electricity filled the air of the ashram courtyard, igniting a charged atmosphere that reached both backward in time and heavenward in intensity.

The two attendants, who had never before seen their guru cry, became afraid. They moved to eject the foreign men, telling them that their time was up. The guru opened his eyes, suddenly back in the present, and waved the attendants away.

Eliezer pulled out of his backpack a Hebrew Bible and presented it to the guru.

With a wistful smile, the guru told him, “I already have one, and I’ll tell you from where.” Relating the story like a Hasidic tale, he told how, in the 1980s, an Israeli with a dilemma came to him here at the ashram. The Israeli had been a soldier in the first Lebanon War. Traumatized by the war and the ceaseless specter of more wars in Israel, the non-observant ex-soldier had decided that he wanted to sever all connection with Israel and with Judaism. He became a Christian, but he was unsatisfied and unsettled. So he came to India and started to practice Hinduism. But here, too, he felt unsatisfied. Coming to Swami Vijayananda, he complained, “Maybe the reason I’m not finding myself in India, and I can’t get rid of this Jewish feeling, is that I still have the Bible they gave me when I was inducted into the Israeli army. Is it proper to throw it away?”

“No,” the guru replied, “don’t throw it away. Give it to me.” He proceeded to tell the ex-soldier the story of Rabbi Akiva, who, as the Romans were flaying him alive, recited the Shema. When his agonized students asked him how he could perform the mitzvah of Shema while being tortured, Rabbi Akiva replied that all his life he had yearned to get to the place of serving God with his very life. “I told him,” related the guru, “Do you know the difference between Rabbi Akiva and us? After all we went through [in the Holocaust and the Lebanon War], we asked, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?’” The guru had been relating the story in English, but at this point he quoted the line from Psalm 22 in its original Hebrew. Then he continued in English: “’But Rabbi Akiva,’ I told the Israeli soldier, ‘understood that his suffering was not a punishment, but rather a path to the highest spiritual state of attaining complete unity with God.’“ The guru peered at Eliezer and Natti. “I don’t know where he is now, but I think he must have come back to Judaism after what I told him.”

This was Eliezer’s opening. “Maybe it’s time for you, too, to come back. You’re not young. Do you want to be cremated and your ashes thrown into the Ganges? It’s time for you to come back to Judaism.”

“You’re trying to take our guru away from us,” they accused the Jewish visitors.

At that the attendants got agitated and angry. “You’re trying to take our guru away from us,” they accused the Jewish visitors.

Eliezer made one last try. “God loves every Jew, and wants every Jew to return to Judaism.”

The attendants had heard enough. Furiously, they evicted the two Hasids.

In April, 2010, Swami Vijayananda died at the ashram in Hardwar.

Who Are Your Attendants?

Every Jew has what is called a pintele Yid . a Jewish soul-spark that can never be snuffed out. No matter how far a Jew strays, no matter how vociferously he repudiates his Jewish roots or how diffidently she ignores her Jewish soul or how many decades have elapsed immersed in a different religion, the Jewish spark is always there, ready to be ignited anew.

However, every Jew also is flanked by “attendants” who assiduously work to keep the pintele Yid from being ignited. Sometimes the attendant is fear, sometimes distraction, sometimes egotism, sometimes complacency.

God repeatedly sends messengers into our lives. They come in diverse costumes: sometimes a stranger who utters a portentous, unsettling statement; sometimes a wake-up call in the form of a tragedy or near-tragedy; sometimes a blessing so bountiful it reveals its Source; sometimes an unlikely encounter with a rabbi or a rebbetzin on a plane, or on the street, or in Wal-Mart’s. In a remote town in India in 1968, I met a Jewish doctor from Wales who changed my life. I know a Jew, also a doctor, who lived an utterly un-Jewish life on a Pacific island, and who one day in the mail received an invitation to a medical conference in, of all places, Israel. All such messengers come bearing igniters.

But the attendants, with frightened or sneering visages, wave their arms and try to keep us from heeding the messengers. The attendants utter their shrill warnings: “You don’t have time to go to that class.” “Don’t accept that Shabbat invitation or they’ll try to brainwash you.” “You’re too old/established/comfortable to start changing now.” “Your level of Jewish observance is fine; don’t become a fanatic.” “If you start observing mitzvot, you’ll miss out on all the fun in life.” “They’re trying to take you away.”

It takes courage to banish the attendants, to realize that rather than protecting us, they are driving away the Fedex man who is trying to deliver the tidings of a surprise inheritance.

The Jewish spark, the pintele Yid , in each of us, is waiting to burst into flames of joy, love, and fulfillment.

For Sara Yoheved Rigler's FREE WEBINAR FOR SINGLE WOMEN, go to http://www. sararigler. com/ie/ladder8242014.php .

Published: January 28, 2012