My irrational hatred of Geoffrey Miller's Mate
I.
Of every dating advice book I’ve ever read, the single one that drives me the most nuts is Geoffrey Miller’s and Tucker Max’s book Mate: Becoming The Man Women Want.
No one understands why I hate this book so much. “It seems like this book is, like, fine, Ozy,” they will say. “Your level of irrational hatred seems entirely out of proportion to how bad the takes are. Honestly, we’re proud of Tucker Max for being so reasonable.”
Here is a representative sampling of the advice in Mate:
Get enough sleep.
Eat a healthy diet.
Exercise regularly.
Wear clothes that fit.
Learn to dance.
Learn “manly skills”: hiking, swimming, horseback riding, camping, boating, driving a stick shift, home repair, car maintenance, picking locks, using power tools, hunting, sailing.
Learn to play at least one team sport.
Do small spontaneous things you enjoy.
Do mindfulness meditation.
Get better friends.
Go to therapy.
Be funny.
Be willing to try new things.
Try to solve the problem when something goes wrong, instead of complaining.
Learn new things about the world.
Stay intellectually humble instead of refusing to admit you’re wrong or trying to look like you know more than you do.
Set goals and achieve them.
Have good personal grooming.
Keep your house clean.
Avoid overindulging in vices (porn, alcohol, junk food, video games) but also don’t completely abstain from them.
Be good with animals and children.
Volunteer regularly.
Be warm, friendly, kind, and interested in others.
Give good gifts.
Learn martial arts so you can defend yourself in a fight.
Be decisive.
I will admit that the advice in Mate is unobjectionable, in the literal sense that I struggle to object to it.
The basic idea is that you become sexually successful by being a good person, in a common-sensical sort of way—the kind of person who makes people around you go “yeah, that guy’s decent. He really has his shit together.”
It fails gracefully. If you follow all this advice and don’t get a girlfriend, at least you’ll be a virtuous person with a healthy body, a tidy house, and a number of hobbies which are both personally enriching and helpful to others. This is an improvement on, say, Daygame Mastery, which fails by making you spend hours telling tourists racist jokes.
But I HATE IT. I HATE IT SO MUCH.
II.
My most reasonable complaint is that this isn’t very good dating advice.
