Attractiveness is, as everyone should recognize, subjective. Some people are very sensitive to height and some are very sensitive to intelligence and so forth.

Attractiveness is, as everyone should recognize, subjective. Some people are very sensitive to height and some are very sensitive to intelligence and so forth. After being married for the period when most people were finding partners, I divorced and started dating again. I realized that I wasn't very good at small-talk, and I was having trouble meeting women. The HN comments here are full of suggestions, but they are isolated and not systematic. By now I'm sure that everyone is aware of the "pick-up artist" community on the internet. I'm not a fan of the idea of learning how to impress as many women as one can in order to have sex with someone you really don't care about, but while that almost underground community was still nascent I read about it and decided that it was something interesting enough to investigate. I traveled to southern California and met Mystery, the person described in Neil Strauss's (at the time) new book, The Game. I hung out with them for two days and was invited to go out one evening with them. There were around a dozen guys in the group and it was a very fascinating evening. No, I didn't pick up a girl in a club and get laid, but talking to the guys was very interesting it did change things for me. Most of the guys I met were like me. They were lonely and wanted a serious girlfriend and had always had trouble approaching and striking up conversations with stangers. I was always able to talk to people from my field or other academically inclined people, but I learned to be more interesting to others and to understand attraction from both sides. It helped my confidence tremendously and consequently I found more women attracted to me. That's a long introduction to my recommendations: - don't get caught up in the manipulative techniques being promulgated by the recent pick-up experts - learn more about attraction by reading some of the early stuff talked about by, say, Mystery - approach more strangers and stike up conversations (you don't need to be online to meet people) - develop a wider circle of friends - get out and make your life itself more interesting by finding new interests, this make you interesting to others - take your company public! Success helps. Generally, I've found online dating to be a slow, frustrating process. It's much better to simple strike up conversations with people that you find attractive. The time to line up dates online and exchange information and then discover that the person is nothing like their old high school photos is disheartening.