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The Rational Male - Rollo Tomassi. I know it likely going to be a hated example, but nonetheless I strongly suggest to read it if you are confused or unsure ab

The Rational Male - Rollo Tomassi. I know it likely going to be a hated example, but nonetheless I strongly suggest to read it if you are confused or unsure about certain aspects of relationships.

GaryNumanVevo 3y ago
I'd agree, Rational Male is a life changing book. It works on a number of levels: - Confirms many young man's (usually wrong) biases about women. - Provides a convenient post-hoc rationalization to men who cannot get laid. - Further mystifies the idea of women by building convoluted pseudo-intellectual structures.
- sa-code 3y ago
  It definitely changed a friend's life for the worse, and he's gotten even worse at relationships than he previously was
  - jesterson 3y ago
    It doesn’t say anything about the book quality. The book gives knowledge, whether or how to apply the knowledge is absolutely different subject. People tend to be stick to their biases and delusions, with relationships particularly so.
OfSanguineFire 3y ago
As someone who has occasionally stumbled across the community around this book at Reddit, I do wonder why so many of these men keep trying. When I reached, from relationship experience, my own conclusion that any partner in a relationship would inevitably have different and incompatible goals, motivations, and outlook from own, I simply chose to live alone from then on. Obviously people might crave companionship. But if one is frustrated in obtaining that to the point of seizing on literature like Tomassi’s book, why keep hitting one’s head against that wall?
- jesterson 3y ago
  I would suggest one perspective - curiosity. Often i like to observe relationships not from standpoint of having it or getting in, but from standpoint of evolutionary game, which it is. Surely sometimes it’s easier to recluse yourself from situation or a problem. But it won’t be fun :)
prepend 3y ago
I had this book recommended to me so many times, I read it and really disagreed with it on so many levels [0]. Generally I don’t like how the author acts like everything is rooted in science and everyone is forced to act out their biology. And I don’t like its oppositional nature of men vs women in a zero sum game to get what? Married? Laid? It’s not a useless book, especially if you want to be an alpha and pick up girls. But I think I’m looking for a bit more than that and feel there are genuine connections based on interest and purpose and aligned goals. And the other people interested in that would detect and not be interested in the “tactics” called out here. The book mentions hypergamy many, many times and this is based on the biological inferiority of women to men and for women to seek out men more attractive than them. I think there are now many women with equal or even superior careers and ambitions and passions who aren’t seeking a “superior” mate. The book spends some time calling out how people like me are wrong, etc. but the evidence presented is a bunch of anecdotes. And every anecdote told just made me think all parties are skeezy and not attractive to me. In that I don’t want to pick up waitresses and randos, etc. So this may be a situation of the book and technique just isn’t for me. But I wanted to share this because it really is recommended so much to me and it perplexed me how bad the book seemed to me. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4273072082 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4273072082
- lxgr 3y ago
  > Generally I don’t like how the author acts like everything is rooted in science and everyone is forced to act out their biology. The naturalistic fallacy is a pretty easy one to commit, and it seems to be running especially rampant in the genre of "scientific"/"rational" dating/relationship advice. Don't get me wrong, I believe that evolutionary biology has tons of interesting discoveries that can help humanity understand itself better, and I find it extremely interesting myself. But the fallacy happens when looking at what there is, in terms of the biological/genetic basis (and frankly, the evidence and science is often not nearly as clear as these books present it), and taking that as a guideline or even commandments as for what there ought to be. Harari has a nice way of putting this idea in "Sapiens": If there is a defining nature to Homo sapiens, it is that we have a quite strong and persistent capability of not being bound to our biology's defining nature (hope I'm paraphrasing somewhat accurately here). Of course biology (as the hardware that's running our software) has an incredibly strong influence on our experience, and denying that has caused a lot of needless suffering (and still does), but just explaining away the significant impact of culture and our minds on our biological reality seems overly reductionist. Or to go with a computational analogy: Our minds are turing-complete, so they can run any software there can possibly exist – some paths do have extremely good hardware acceleration, but efficiency isn't everything in (human) life :)

The Rational Male - Rollo Tomassi. I know it likely going to be a hated example, but nonetheless I strongly suggest to read it if you are confused or unsure about certain aspects of relationships.

GaryNumanVevo 3y ago

I'd agree, Rational Male is a life changing book. It works on a number of levels: - Confirms many young man's (usually wrong) biases about women. - Provides a convenient post-hoc rationalization to men who cannot get laid. - Further mystifies the idea of women by building convoluted pseudo-intellectual structures.

sa-code 3y ago
It definitely changed a friend's life for the worse, and he's gotten even worse at relationships than he previously was
- jesterson 3y ago
  It doesn’t say anything about the book quality. The book gives knowledge, whether or how to apply the knowledge is absolutely different subject. People tend to be stick to their biases and delusions, with relationships particularly so.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

As someone who has occasionally stumbled across the community around this book at Reddit, I do wonder why so many of these men keep trying. When I reached, from relationship experience, my own conclusion that any partner in a relationship would inevitably have different and incompatible goals, motivations, and outlook from own, I simply chose to live alone from then on. Obviously people might crave companionship. But if one is frustrated in obtaining that to the point of seizing on literature like Tomassi’s book, why keep hitting one’s head against that wall?

jesterson 3y ago
I would suggest one perspective - curiosity. Often i like to observe relationships not from standpoint of having it or getting in, but from standpoint of evolutionary game, which it is. Surely sometimes it’s easier to recluse yourself from situation or a problem. But it won’t be fun :)

prepend 3y ago

I had this book recommended to me so many times, I read it and really disagreed with it on so many levels [0]. Generally I don’t like how the author acts like everything is rooted in science and everyone is forced to act out their biology. And I don’t like its oppositional nature of men vs women in a zero sum game to get what? Married? Laid? It’s not a useless book, especially if you want to be an alpha and pick up girls. But I think I’m looking for a bit more than that and feel there are genuine connections based on interest and purpose and aligned goals. And the other people interested in that would detect and not be interested in the “tactics” called out here. The book mentions hypergamy many, many times and this is based on the biological inferiority of women to men and for women to seek out men more attractive than them. I think there are now many women with equal or even superior careers and ambitions and passions who aren’t seeking a “superior” mate. The book spends some time calling out how people like me are wrong, etc. but the evidence presented is a bunch of anecdotes. And every anecdote told just made me think all parties are skeezy and not attractive to me. In that I don’t want to pick up waitresses and randos, etc. So this may be a situation of the book and technique just isn’t for me. But I wanted to share this because it really is recommended so much to me and it perplexed me how bad the book seemed to me. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4273072082 https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4273072082

lxgr 3y ago
> Generally I don’t like how the author acts like everything is rooted in science and everyone is forced to act out their biology. The naturalistic fallacy is a pretty easy one to commit, and it seems to be running especially rampant in the genre of "scientific"/"rational" dating/relationship advice. Don't get me wrong, I believe that evolutionary biology has tons of interesting discoveries that can help humanity understand itself better, and I find it extremely interesting myself. But the fallacy happens when looking at what there is, in terms of the biological/genetic basis (and frankly, the evidence and science is often not nearly as clear as these books present it), and taking that as a guideline or even commandments as for what there ought to be. Harari has a nice way of putting this idea in "Sapiens": If there is a defining nature to Homo sapiens, it is that we have a quite strong and persistent capability of not being bound to our biology's defining nature (hope I'm paraphrasing somewhat accurately here). Of course biology (as the hardware that's running our software) has an incredibly strong influence on our experience, and denying that has caused a lot of needless suffering (and still does), but just explaining away the significant impact of culture and our minds on our biological reality seems overly reductionist. Or to go with a computational analogy: Our minds are turing-complete, so they can run any software there can possibly exist – some paths do have extremely good hardware acceleration, but efficiency isn't everything in (human) life :)