We’re told we live in the most interconnected time in the history of the world. There’s a social media platform for every age group, gender and interest, and (apparently) it’s never been easier to make a connection with someone, even if he or she is halfway around the world, in no time at all.
So why does it feel like we’re more isolated, anti-social, and anxious than ever?
Why, in giant cities crammed with millions of people, do we go out of our way to avoid eye contact—whether sitting on public transport, or even just walking down the street?
And why, even in previously social environments like coffee shops, do we look around and see most people’s heads buried in laptops or smartphones and ears plugged with headphones?
The answer, surprisingly, is less to do with technology or society, and everything to do with our genetics and our in-built psychology.
Live and Let Die
For a good few hundred thousand years, before the birth of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, humans lived in small, nomadic tribes of around 100 people. These tribes practiced what Christopher Ryan terms fierce egalitarianism, where social norms surrounding sharing food, tools and all resources, were strictly enforced. These rules were essential for the tribes continued survival. (After all, just one individual hoarding food for themselves instead of sharing it could cause the rest of the tribe to starve!)
The punishment for breaking the rules would be being cast out of the tribe, where that individual would very likely die (and, more importantly from an evolutionary perspective, would not pass on their genetic material to any future generations).
Thus, we are all descendants of people who were conformists. This is illustrated in the famous Solomon-Asch conformity experiments, where educated graduate students would ignore clear, obvious evidence in front of their own eyes in order to agree with what their fellow classmates were saying.
What on earth does this have to do with online dating you ask?
Well, it explains why the feeling of fear, the high heart rate, sweaty palms and all the flight-or-flight responses that get activated in a life-or-death situation are also activated when you are attempting to summon up the courage to chat up that cute girl sitting at the table by the window.
Your fear of being rejected is actually a 100,000s of years-old fear of public embarrassment, with the consequence of being cast out of the tribe and sure to die alone.
Think about it — what’s more scary: telling a story to one friend over coffee, or having to tell the same story, on stage, in front of a crowd of 500 strangers? What would be more embarrassing: asking someone out via a text message and being shot down, or realising the entire exchange was in a group text?
So the real fear isn’t even that your romantic interest might say no. It’s that other people would see that they said no and ridicule you for it!
So, the underlying fear that stops us from going for what we really want (whether a romantic partner, or starting our own business, or writing our novel) is being judged negatively by others.
Your subconscious decision is tallying up the potential upside of maybe having an awkward conversation that might lead to a phone number, which could potentially lead to a date sometime in the future… against the downside of public ridicule and almost certain death!
It’s like giving a normal person the opportunity to grab a blood-soaked penny out of the inside of an angry shark’s mouth. Why risk such a severe downside when the upside is barely positive at all?
The DNA of Fear and Risk
Historically, men and women have dealt with this fear of rejection in two different ways:
Women, genetically lower in testosterone and therefore more risk-averse, simply avoid the opportunity to be rejected by never making approaches in the first place! Across most societies for most of history, women have been the passive recipients of men’s romantic advances (although in some societies today, such as Japan and some Scandinavian countries, this is changing)
Men, especially during peak testosterone production periods of the late teens and early 20s, are genetically predisposed to take greater risks. After all, enshrined in most traditional cultures is some form of “coming of age” ritual or ceremony, usually involving a young boy having to face at least one dangerous situation with a high risk of injury or death. Coming through this would mean you’ve transitioned from a scared little boy into a man who fend for himself and provide for his family, if not the entire tribe. The message is clear: to be a man, you need to take risks. But, those risks have big payoffs — enough food for the continued survival of the entire tribe for the next week, for example.
So, in most cultures, men are expected to take the “risk” of initiating romantic encounters with women. And, if you think about it, doing so would have been nothing compared to the kinds of risks early men would be taking on an almost daily basis! But of course, we no longer live in a world where we need to pass any kind of physically dangerous test to become a man, nor do we need to spend a significant portion of time hunting, or exerting ourselves in any way just to survive.
In fact, since the post-war boom of the 1950s onwards, even the poorest in any Western democratic nation has been afforded a basic standard of living that ensures they can, at the very least, eat a meal a day and have clothes and shelter. And rightly so!
The outcome of this state of affairs, however, is that men are no longer encouraged or required to take these kinds of risks from an early age. The biggest risk the average man will take these days is quitting his job or investing in a tech startup. Certainly nothing that produces the same kind of “it’s me or the bear” fear of death!
Therefore, this makes that feeling of fear of rejection seem like even more of a big deal than it would have been to men even a few hundred years ago. But nonetheless, men of the 1950s-1990s still had to muster up the courage to ask a girl out, often in person, and potentially be told “no” in front of all of their friends.
Even after passing that test, they would still have to follow through and arrange dates, often over the phone, having to actually talk to the parents of the girl they wanted to date, and having to stumble through awkward silences during conversation with her as they got to know each other.
The Solution is The Problem
Nowadays, the ‘solution’ provided by technology has enabled us to eliminate most of these awkward stumbling blocks, which should have made meeting and dating easier and more fun. So why hasn’t it?
After all, there is no need to risk being humiliated in public, because you can just set up a dating profile and wait for whoever’s interested to message you. You don’t need to stumble through awkward conversations because you can just text, where you have all the time in the world to think of the perfect response that is witty, not too needy, and timed to indicate how busy and popular you are.
In our modern lives today, instead of having to “risk” a potentially awkward conversation by calling up an old school friend to ask how they are doing, we can just “like” their Facebook status and feel like we’ve reconnected, whilst they get to feel like we still care about them.
Why face the possibility of physical violence or arrest by attending a demonstration about a cause we believe in? Just tweet a link to the petition we’ve signed, and in that moment get the same feeling of being part of a movement and making a difference, without any of the downside.
And while we’re logged on, we can continue to curate the alternate version of ourselves composed of the one selfie out of the 29 we took with the right filter from the right angle on instagram at the sports game, and the 3 best photos out of 53 from that trip that makes us look adventurous on Facebook (de-tagging ourselves from the rest of the ones uploaded by our less discerning friends), along with the Snapchat video that showed us in the middle of the best 10 seconds of that party.
Social media has allowed us to create an alternate universe. A universe where there is zero possibility of rejection, embarrassment or awkwardness, but we can reap the same feelings of social inclusion, acceptance and validation as if we were surrounded by adoring friends in real life.
Tinder and online dating apps similarly enable us to potentially attain the desired outcome of a date with someone we find attractive — but without having to actually summon up the courage to walk up, have a conversation and risk awkward, painful rejection in a social situation where people we know might see us fail.
Even worse, as researcher Sherry Turkle has discovered and written about extensively, the more we rely on communicating over apps, the more our social skills, empathy and genuine connections with others atrophy.
The Digital Divide
It shouldn’t come as much surprise that, over the last decade, the popularity of this new “rejection-free” method of meeting has surged, leading to the current state of affairs in which 39% of new heterosexual relationships in the US are formed online. So does this mean that men and women are meeting more of the right kind of person, having more dates that go well, and having more successful, longer-lasting relationships? Well, no.
The founder of OKCupid admits that the most attractive women receive the vast majority of messages and likely give up and leave pretty quickly when confronted with the sheer volume of bland, uninteresting “sup” and “hey” they’ll suddenly find in their inbox. And that’s not the worst of it. Because it’s not a real social situation with real people around, any man, however nice and polite in real life, has the sudden confidence to be incredibly sexual, vulgar, and brash, whereas, if he were actually speaking to a woman face-to-face, they’d never say such things.
As for guys, it was widely publicised a few years ago that 97% of men quit online dating within just 3 months, mainly due to lack of responses. In fact, the authors of Freakonomics found that 56% of men never even receive a single message.
The Opportunity
So, men of today, there’s actually a huge opportunity that hardly anybody is talking about. An opportunity to separate yourself from 99% of the douchebags out there that hardly any guy will ever contemplate.
It’s a way to meet women that instantly shows the most attractive trait women want in a man—confidence. You don’t have to sign up for anything, you don’t have to pay a penny, there is no downside, and you can do it in around 5 minutes per day.
The secret is: Strike up a conversation with a woman you find attractive in real life – for example, while grabbing a cup of coffee.
That’s it!
This seemingly obvious and simple skill is, in fact, one of the most powerful ways to make a connection in the modern world. Because most people, especially men, are so locked into their devices out of fear of social awkwardness and rejection… just going over, saying hello, and giving a genuine compliment, is literally the most ballsy, romantic, unique thing most women will experience not just that day, but that year or even in their whole life!
If the idea of approaching a woman in person seems absolutely terrifying, or if you have NO idea what to do or say… don’t worry, you’re in the right place:
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So go ahead—try logging off, deleting all the apps, and start looking at the world around you as a sea of possibilities for new connections in the real world.