“Just be yourself” has a well-deserved negative reputation, because of its role as Generic Advice Given Because Social Rules State That It’s Wrong To Be Cynical About Dating People. Nevertheless, I think that at its core it is basically correct, particularly for long-term relationships.
Most people would not want to date most other people. They’re extroverted and you’re introverted; you share no common interests; they want sex every day and you’re a once-a-month kind of guy; you’re both submissive people who want your partner to have the final say in decisions; you have different religions; you’re both neurotic, and you feed on each other’s catastrophizations until every broken sink seems like the literal apocalypse. (For a vivid illustration of this principle, go on OKCupid and start looking at people who are a fifty percent match with you. Yikes.)
So a fair amount of dating is locating the people who do want to date you, by filtering out the people who don’t want to date you as efficiently as possible. Being yourself is an excellent way to do so, for two reasons. First, one of the basic criteria for almost everyone is “wants to date people who have the traits I possess”. The simplest way to find out if someone wants to date people like you is to, well, be you. While being openly neurodivergent, gender-non-conforming, or broke turns off a lot of people, it’s a lot easier to allow them to quietly not hit on you than to have the awkward conversation six weeks in.
Second, a lot of sensible people’s relationship criteria boil down to “I want a compatible partner”. And compatibility goes both ways! Christians usually want to date other Christians; low-libido people usually want to date other low-libido people; gamers usually want to date other gamers. Simply by presenting yourself as a Christian low-libido gamer, you can increase your likelihood of finding a fellow Christian low-libido gamer.
It can be really dispiriting to be rejected again and again. (Understatement of the century.) But the thing is, you only need one person. (Well, okay, poly people can need up to six, but that’s still not very many.) As depressing as it seems in the moment, in the long run, it is actually much more important that you find someone you’re genuinely compatible with than that you have second dates with a dozen people you aren’t.
There are two caveats, I think, to “just be yourself”.
First, it’s wise to market yourself. Imagine that you’re trying to sell cookies. You might put the cookies in a nice box, have “0 grams of trans fat!” on the front, or even have a cartoon mascot. However, you’re not going to try to sell the cookies by saying “cookies are terrible, we should sell mops instead.” Similarly, you can choose an attractive photo in good lighting to go on the dating site, practice your flirtation skills, or get a good haircut– and still be yourself.
In particular, the single piece of advice that most improves the dating life of nerds, in my experience, is ask people out. People come up with all kinds of complicated explanations about girls going after assholes and their ugliness and the social oppression of nerds, when in reality they can’t get dates because they don’t ask people out, and it is fixed as soon as they begin actually asking people out. (Women, as the traditional initiatees, usually have fewer dating problems from not asking people out, but in my experience there are tons of perfectly attractive guys who are too shy to ask anybody out and you can improve your level of dating success tremendously by taking advantage of this market failure. Only you can prevent sad lonely nerd boys.)
Pep talk tangent: So what’s the worst that could happen? You creep her out? Well, don’t ask out your coworkers until you have a better sense of what you’re doing, and all that will happen is that she has a mildly uncomfortable experience. You shouldn’t deliberately cause people to have mildly uncomfortable experiences, but mistakes are a natural part of learning, and it isn’t the end of the world for you or for her. On the other hand, the worst thing that could happen if you don’t ask people out is that you’re lonely for the rest of your life, which is way worse than even the worst possible outcome of asking people out. End tangent.
Second, it’s wise to be your best self. This is my general life advice, not my dating advice. A lot of our basic personality traits, preferences, and so on are fixed (at least for now, until we reach the Glorious Transhumanist Future). Attempting to change these is unlikely to be particularly effective.
A lot of people seem to interpret self-improvement and being yourself as opposites. That seems, frankly, absurd to me. If I’m someone who has always dreamed of writing a novel, have I somehow betrayed my fundamental identity if I stop dreaming and put fingers to keyboard? There is an obvious difference between “I value learning to appreciate new experiences, so I’m going to get into modern art” and “I will pretend to like modern art so that people will think I’m cool” or “I will pretend to like modern art because liking modern art is what sophisticated people are supposed to do.” The former is good; the latter is, in my experience, toxic.
Thing of Things 
As I’ve said on occasion, the correct fits-on-a-t-shirt piece of advice imo would be, *express* yourself.
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(to say, I mean that as a summary of what this post says)
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The only thing I can think to add is “don’t pre filter.” If you’ve already decided that Susan from math class is the only girl you can be happy with and you haven’t yet even begun a relationship of any sort beyond “we take math together” and honestly you barely know her by regular people standards… yer gonna have a bad time.
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Ozy, I love this, but I think you grossly underestimate the value of “just ask people out” as dating advice for women. I know my love life improved STAGGERINGLY when I realized that asking guys out wasn’t some kind of special Good China I could only get out in cases of deepest infatuation– I could ask out anyone I like, as many different people as I like, so long as they seemed to be available– it’s like a cheat code! And yeah, before meeting my current dude, I got rejected some– but so what? That’s another perk of using “ask people out” as the everyday china and not the special set that’s only for Thanksgiving–one “no” is a lot easier to swallow if you’ve had some “yeses”.
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I think even for men people underestimate the extent to which “just go ask more people” is great advice. Everybody wastes too much time hoping everybody else will make the first move.
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I was trying to strike the right balance of encouraging everyone to ask people out and warding off the people complaining that it is much easier for girls to get by without asking people out. 😛
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Ah, I understand. 🙂 Although for me at least, the kind of guys who ask me out are, as pool, way less desirable than the ones I do ask out (for all this talk of “Alpha Males”… some of us ladies like a shy guy 😉 My boyfriend said he was shocked and delighted when I kissed him goodnight after our first date, but he never would have had the nerve himself because he didn’t want to seem creepy). Actually, this is a pet peeve of mine about dating advice aimedat women: It’s all about “catching A MAN” like they’re salmon or something. I don’t want A MAN I want a man I find handsome who shares my interests and values whose company I enjoy. Getting one of those is a VERY DIFFERENT MATTER than finding a Homo Sapien who goes by “Mr.”
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How old is “just be yourself” as dating advice? Because if it’s a reaction to “systems” of advice, etc that are based around controlling your behaviour, sometimes to the point of deception, it’s significantly better than if it stands alone. Stuff like “The Rules” and PUA date to the ’90s, I think.
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I think some of the traumas related to “just ask people out” stem from the school horror stories, when everyone knows everyone, and you can’t get away from your rejections, and some spiteful people can make the “worst possible outcome of asking people out” pretty damn bad, and somewhat long-term.
Except that only applies to childhood school settings. Once you’ve graduated from the isolation of primary education, yeah, there aren’t really dangers to “just ask people out.”
Some of the not-just-being-yourself also stems from the school horror stories, when the perceived status benefits of being in a relationship/getting laid outweighs the benefits of an actually good relationship. And with the stable and limited school population, there’s the fear that there aren’t people compatible for even friendship in any given sub-group. (Within a class, lunch period, club, team, etc.) From the student’s point of view, there’s the risk of being lonely for the rest of their school life, and then being ostracized for that loneliness on top of that, (self-perpetuating cycle) so having a social group by any means (including not being one’s self) is preferable.
Fortunately, those fears are often exaggerated, and in larger schools, negative interaction between social groups is rare.
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Probably is true for some people, but certainly not for me; I was home-schooled (academic reasons, not religious). But I still have enough trouble with this that my rationale for making an OKC account last year was “I will almost certainly die alone if I don’t do this”. I have little doubt that at least part of this is just me being painfully aware of how bad my own skills at this sort of thing are; I was learning number theory when most people were learning how to flirt.
I also think you may be underestimating the presence of the former effect in adulthood. Suppose, for example, that Leslie is a rationalist and would strongly prefer to date another rationalist, but there aren’t very many rationalists and all the local ones know each other. Okay, fine, bad example; there are features specific to rationalists that make that sort of bad outcome unlikely. But it’s not like there are no other tight-knit social groups within which relationships would be desirable if they were possible.
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An SSC commenter once said that the actually helpful version of “be yourself” is something like “focus on making the person you’re interacting with happy and comfortable rather than on performing a particular identity.” I think that this is actually great advice, especially in situations where you can’t afford to just let people take you or leave you (ie: at work.)
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The best advice I ever got for job interviews (or cocktail parties) was “get the other person talking about themselves and smile.” It’s uncanny.
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Yeah, and the extended version of that– “find out something the other person can teach you, and learn from them” is pretty amazing for building deeper relationships.
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Great advice, Ozy! Personally, dating got a lot easier when I started with the activity and worked backward. (For example, if a band I liked was in town, or if I just wanted something to do on the weekend and looked through the activity calendar).
Then, once I had an activity in mind, I would invite people until someone said yes. It took a lot of pressure of the ask and the date because all of the sudden, it wasn’t a big judgment about whether we were Good Enough for each other, it was about whether we wanted to go hear the Sun Messengers.
You need some people to invite, but it’s usually not hard to chat up several people on Match or OKCupid, then invite them when you have something you want to do.
(And now that I think about it, on the “market yourself” angle, it’s probably better to have someone see you having fun and doing something you’re passionate about, rather than just meeting in a bar judging each other.
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This is plain old good advice for life. My analogy is is you want to win the lottery you have to buy a ticket. Sometimes lots and lots of them. I had a buddy a long time ago that was a male nurse in a time when men didn’t become nurses. I asked him about it once. His response was that he liked medicine, wasn’t going to get into med school and nursing was where all the girls were. Made perfect sense to me.
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I wonder to which extent this can be specific to conventionally attractive women. This – https://www.okcupid.com/deep-end/a-womans-advantage – says that most people on OKC tend to approach those considered more attractive than they themselves. The Narrative seems to be that #YesAllWomen are inundated with unwanted objectifying male attention, and the main problem is how to filter or get noticed by That Guy, who isn’t like others. But I feel like a lot of dating advice and narrative may be created by and for conventionally attractive and confident people – perhaps because they’re overrepresented among those who have enough dating experience to feel comfortable with making claims about it, without realizing that it simply doesn’t apply to everyone else. And that may put women who don’t satisfy mainstream beauty standards at a hugely disadvantaged position: as the study also shows, women rarely message first regardless of how attractive they are, and how many messages they get. But women who don’t get asked out all the time may encounter The Narrative and find it unhelpful, and perhaps even invalidating to their experience by implying that this isn’t what The Female Experience is like, and men who encounter it may assume that women who complain about the lack of attention, and could benefit from asking people out are doing so while being actually inundated with attention, then they get bitter about this, and start rating about “female privilege”.
It’s a marshmallow test. Loneliness may be slowly soul-crushing, but at any given moment it’s unlikely to be anywhere as strong as the discomfort about being in unfamiliar and awkward social situation, as well not knowing whether or not one would be able to stay friends with a person if they’re asking an existing friend out, and get rejected (though in this case success is also somewhat scary, since if it does grow into a relationship, and then break-up, staying friends may be even harder). Perhaps having such insight is helpful to some, but I think to most people knowing the only correct answer to the marshmallow test doesn’t help to pass it.
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Re: your marshmallow test analogy, there’s another aspect which you kind of touched on but I thought could use a bit more talking about, which is to say the effect of repeated rejections.
Yes, being lonely sucks. And let’s say that the best way to fix that is to ask people out. Reasonable enough so far. But we have Charlie, who has asked out a couple dozen people of their preferred gender, and been rejected every time. Under the well-established principles of behaviourism, Charlie is progressively less likely to ask anyone out, because being rejected sucks in the moment worse than loneliness, and has yet to yield any positive dividends. Couple that with a consistent media depiction of someone like Charlie who asks and gets rejected, or is single for long periods of time, as pathetic, and Charlie’s self-esteem is going to be pretty near zero. So the advice Charlie needs is going to be a bit more involved than “Ask people out!” You may as well tell the poor person “work hard!”
So Charlie ends up in a big ol’ lump of learned helplessness, where no matter what they do they’re miserable. And there’s not a lot of help available for people like that in our society.
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