Page 25 - MidWeek - May 19, 2021

MAY 19, 2021 MIDWEEK 25
I’ m a guy in my senior year of college. I can- not figure out how my roommate gets all the women he does. He’s a huge jerk to everyone, including women — the typical “bad boy.” He breaks any rule or law he can, doesn’ t care who he hurts and makes very little effort with wom- en, yet all my female friends go for him. A good friend even left my bed in the mid- dle of the night to get into his! Why? – Nice Guy
THE SCIENCE ADVICE GODDESS Amy Alkon HowToBeAGoodBadBoy
see that women treat you very differently.
There are sure to be some hiccups, but you should even- tually feel ready to do this con- fident, easygoing thing as you: a nice guy who’s trained him- self into having the good parts of bad-boy mojo. You should have an easier time with the ladies as you approach your 30s because many women will have been jerk-burned at least once and learned their lesson. They want a guy who can hold their attention for hours with his wit and good nature — as opposed to the dude who seems destined to hold off the cops for hours by shouting demands from inside the 7-Eleven.
Women — especially in their 20s — will blather on about how they want a nice, reliable guy. Then they find one and immediately despise him for how nice and reliable he is: like how he always calls when he says he will and there’s never that recorded voice on the line first, “Will you accept a collect call from prison?”
Machiavellianism, named for 16th century Italian polit- ical adviser Niccolo Machi- avelli, plays out in ruthless scheming, callousness and self-interest. Psychopathy shows itself in callous detach- ment, poor impulse control, and a lack of empathy and re- morse. Narcissism is reflected in egotism, an extra-large sense of entitlement, a lack of empa- thy and “grandiosity” — an in- flated sense of one’s greatness.
Consider that what drives away women isn’t so much being a nice guy but an overly nice guy: a guy who comes off needy, tentative and desperate to be wanted. Now, maybe you feel needy, tentative and desperate, at least to some de- gree. The thing is there’s no mandate for you to act the way you feel. That said, “fake it till you make it” is actually a bust, because you typically succumb to “cognitive overload”: you have so many things to remem- ber (to come off confident, sur- prising, fun, etc.) that you end up getting overwhelmed and falling apart.
Reading between the lines of your email, you seem to have the same question cognitive scientist Scott Barry Kaufman asked: Basically, do you have tobeajerktogetthegirl?To answer that, Kaufman ex-
Obviously, the dark triad traits themselves — essentially heartless, exploitative user-ish- ness — make exactly no one in their right mind go, “Wow, where do I sign up for some- body with all that?” However, Kaufman observes that dark triad “bad boys tend to have
I instead advise that you “impersonate your way” into the new confident you: ba- sically, borrow a confident, easygoing, fun guy’s persona — meaning, secretly “be” him when, say, talking to a new woman in a coffee shop. Do this repeatedly, and you should
plored the bad boy appeal. He observes that bad boys tend to have big helpings of “dark tri- ad” traits: Machiavellianism, psychopathy and narcissism.
lots of positive traits that come along for the ride (with) the badness,” such as confidence, assertiveness and fearlessness, along with creativity, humor, charisma and high energy — “things women find attractive.”
This is quite the personality poison pack, yet — in research mirroring your experience — evolutionary psychologist Peter Jonason found that dark triad traits were correlated with having more sex partners.
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