Not-A-Book-Review: The Attractive Man (Dating Coach Service)
Below: the only acceptably detailed product review that exists for any service whatsoever in this ~2 billion dollars/year industry. What the hell, guys.
[I’m changing all the names here except for the coaches Matt and Lynn. Also note: Lynn is no longer with the service.]
Male dating coaching is a really interesting subculture. There exist three facts held in tension with one another:
(1) Male dating coaching is the intellectual descendent of pickup artistry: the usage of lies and antisocial manipulation tactics to get women to have sex with you. The early practitioners (Mystery and the like) were profoundly broken people.
(2) Pickup artistry is also, equally, a repository of genuine insight around what constitutes male behavioral attractiveness. Male dating advice is like someone crashed a Mack truck full of gold into a septic plant and now, as a man, you now get to try and extract the gold without becoming covered in shit. “People-pleasing is unattractive;” “women don’t like men who read as being afraid of them;” “women on the main dislike initiating romantic interactions, which means you need to become comfortable with doing that and with being rejected;” “you need to be clearly interested in her sexually or she will put you into the not-a-sexual-being bucket.” Tons of stuff of this general flavor that is extremely true but which is also not common knowledge.
(3) Trying to become attractive as a man is viewed as intrinsically kind of pathetic in our culture, and hilariously this is true regardless of what side of the political aisle you’re on. The progressive version of it is: “Trying to change your behavior to be more attractive to women is intrinsically creepy and manipulative; women are people, not prizes to be won. Just be yourself and you’ll find someone.” The conservative version is: “You don’t need to be hotter. You need to be a better man of more use to your community; trying to ‘become attractive’ is just feminine vanity.” A related phenomenon is the dilemma of men trying to get good dating profile pics, since any picture that carries the whiff of ‘I was trying to take an attractive photograph’ is an instant turnoff. As Cartoons Hate Us puts it, ‘Fellas: is it gay to be perceived?‘
Let’s look at some tweets.
The broader point made:
The least sexy thing you can do as a man is to attempt to become sexy.
This all seems basically true, but it also seems stupid, so about a year ago I decided to ignore this advice and get myself a coach to become more successful in dating.
Modern dating coach services, of which I’ve tried The Attractive Man and (to a lesser extent) Fully Known, exist in a complicated liminal space between pickup artist culture and mainstream culture; TAM and FK and friends have taken it upon themselves to don hazmat gear and extract clean gold from the sewage-strewn wreckage of Male Attractiveness Lore, with varying degrees of success.
I started on The Attractive Man primarily because I wasn’t having a lot of luck on dating apps and the idea of actually chatting up a woman I met off the apps seemed unthinkable, partly for progressive-coded social reasons (nobody asked for my attention!) and also because I just fundamentally could not chill the fuck out around attractive women. Any time I was romantically interested in someone I could feel my usual vibes and good humor shrivel up. It sucked.
I spoke to my then-therapist about this; she gave me the standard advice of “you shouldn’t be nervous about talking to women since rejection isn’t that bad” and other things of that flavor and I really did not find this useful. I mean, obviously, OBVIOUSLY I would not find this useful. Dating advice is so steeped in that message that anyone for whom that message would work for had their social-romantic anxiety cured a long time ago, full-stop. I have a set of theories around why therapists have trouble with dating stuff specifically which are for another essay, I think.
And so I concluded: “What I’m doing right now is not working for me. That being the case, I could take some of the money I’ve made from my tech career and actually hire a professional to teach me whatever skills I need to learn for this domain. Lots of guys have problems of this shape; this is almost certainly fixable.”
One really annoying thing about dating coaches is that it’s hard to figure out who good ones are. I ultimately selected mine based on Trustpilot reviews (for The Attractive Man) and based on blog posts from people I trust (Fully Known was recommended by Aella’s blog.) But beyond random one-off reviews from Trustpilot and the like it’s remarkably hard to get good information about what dating coaches actually provide that doesn’t come directly from their website.
Here’s what I figured: that I just needed to suffer through enough exposure therapy around “chatting up hot girls” that I would chill the fuck out (I was, at the time, operating off of the now-disfavored disinhibition theory of how exposure therapy works for social anxiety). Therapists do not offer this service; therefore I just needed to find a dating coach where I could fly out to meet him/her, be badgered into doing the necessary exposures (read: hitting on girls I was attracted to), and after a certain amount of mortifying exposure therapy I’d be fixed.
Easy-peasy!
So, I signed up for a 4000 dollar “bootcamp” (3-day excursion combining model work and hitting on random women in LA); after a free sample of a “wing girl call” (more on this in a bit) I signed up for the online course + 3-month remote coaching package also, for an additional 3000 dollars. The bootcamp seemed sufficiently promising that I signed up for a 21,000 dollar all-you-can-eat year of bootcamps + weekly remote coaching sessions, which (ignoring flights and hotel costs) represent the whole of what I spent on the program.
The Marketing
TAM is very careful to make it clear that they are not pickup artists and are attempting to do their work in as prosocial a way as they can.
I think Matt (the owner) was very deliberate about ensuring whoever is running the bootcamps alongside him is a woman. This is both useful on a first-order perspective— looking at the website, seeing a woman coach I can feel reasonably well-assured that this is not misogynistic PUA nonsense— and also useful because as a client I can reference my female dating coach to other people and when I do so I can see my conversation partner relax: ah, excellent. Not a misogynist, then.
TAM is not run by therapists, and they are not doing therapy; they do, however, occupy a space that official therapy is quite reluctant to touch as an institution, which means of necessity they’re doing a lot of emotional labor that is, shall we say, therapy-adjacent.
The Coaches
TAM had a constellation of “auxiliary” coaches acting as accountability partners who you’d check in with every 1-2 weeks. They seemed on the main pretty decent people, reasonably empathetic.
TAM also has two “main” coaches: Matt (who owns and runs TAM) and Lynn (until a few months ago when she left).
They’re never in the same place at once— Lynn runs bootcamps from LA, and Matt runs bootcamps from a mix of Mexico, the Phillippines, and New York. Their personalities are a fascinating contrast.
Matt’s Vibe
Matt seemed mostly interested in the nuts-and-bolts of “how does one go about managing a date so that the girl is probably going to be into you at the end of it.” I didn’t interact with him directly all that much; the core vibe he gave off was that he wants to spend his life having sex with a rotating cast of attractive women + his wife (they were poly) and he’s doing that, so I’d say he’s living his best life.
He talked a lot about different “moves” one could pull out as-needed on a date; little tricks that were frequently a bit funny and playful and would often get a good reaction. He really liked turning random interactions with strangers into tiny games, and a lot of his focus for dates was about deliberately constructing an enjoyable, slightly unexpected emotional experience for the woman. Engineered butterflies.
Lynn was very different.
Lynn’s Vibe
Lynn was not, I think, nearly as interested in the nuts-and-bolts of “specific techniques or things to say” as Matt was.
Instead, I think she was interested in the larger project of “making the men of the group very impressive.” For example, lifestyle changes: each bootcamp she’d exhort us to get into dancing (she recommended bachata), and I actually started dancing specifically on her recommendation, though these days I’m more into salsa and west coast swing.
Take that, @dieworkwear.
Anyway: Lynn was, I think, very intentional about not filtering any of her emotional reactions. She could be spectacularly brutal with the men, and she reserved her harshest criticism for what she called people-pleasing— over-agreeing, saying things that were clearly just said because the guy thought that’s what the girl wanted to hear. I think this was a mix of pedagogical motives (people-pleasing is unattractive, and we were there to become more attractive) and also because Lynn on a personal level finds people-pleasing to be pathetic and infuriating.
Lynn left the program, and was replaced by someone named Nora; from what little I’ve seen of her Nora has similar vibes as Lynn did, but I can’t speak to her effectiveness or style beyond that. On checking their website shortly pre-publication, Nora has stopped running the actual bootcamps and was replaced by a male coach, which is unfortunate.
The Attractive Man Services Provided
The Attractive Man (TAM from here on out) is actually a loose bundle of services which vary wildly in their value.
The Online Coursework
I have a lot of complicated feelings about this one. I can tell Matt KNOWS a lot of the guys have issues in working up to a full-on “chat up a pretty girl and ask for her number” approach; for that reason he had the first part of the curriculum be incredibly basic social tasks like “say hi to ten different people you pass by on the street” or “ask some passersby for directions.”
He then moved it from “ask a passerby for directions” to “compliment a girl, then end the interaction;” and then to “do a full-on approach culminating in a number ask.” I think this was an extremely fast escalation and I could tell that for a lot of the guys (Lynn made similar observations) they had trouble with all interactions of the flavor “hold a real-ass conversation with a random stranger”, regardless of gender or level of attraction; I haven’t checked to see if he’s updated the curriculum to have more intermediate layers.
It’s trying to be a structured exposure therapy workbook for social-romantic interactions, which it bundled with weekly 1:1 accountability calls with coaches; I think it was frequently unsuccessful in this goal.
The Wing Girl Calls
This is extremely straightforward: you hop on a zoom call. There is an attractive girl there (“Rebecca”), as well as Lynn (the coach.) There is a queue of other guys who have also hopped on the call.
One by one, in order, you would simulate a cold approach on Rebecca. You have three minutes to strike up a conversation and get her number. I know this sounds very very cheesy, but believe it or not there was shockingly good psychological realism here; the first time I did it I was utterly paralyzed with fear and uncertainty and I was definitely not the only one.
The non-negotiable elements the guy was expected to perform during a Wing Girl Zoom call “approach” were the following:
(1) Compliment. You had to give Rebecca a compliment and it had to be one that oriented her to the nature of the interaction: specifically, that you’re hitting on her. That means it can’t be a totally asexual compliment; “you look absolutely stunning” is great, “I love your earrings” is not.
(2) Qualify. You had to ask Rebecca a question, and the question had to be the kind of thing that might result in you having a non-superficial reason to want to see her again.
(3) Close. You had to ask for a number. You didn’t have to get the number, but you have to ask.
I have some feelings about this framework. In particular the wing girl calls were structured such that it felt like you were sort of… meta-level people-pleasing? Like, getting the number was the objective and the guys all were, in fact, saying things in order to make that happen. It was considered a faux pas during these exercises to reject the simulated girl instead of going for the number, and this gave the “qualification question” kind of this weird perfunctory character which guys would then copy into real life approaches. But I also get why the calls were structured like this: running a conversation where you’re trying to rapidly assess mutual interest is an incredibly complex and difficult social skill that requires you to, in the span of maybe five minutes, imply a large number of things:
(1) That you’re calibrated to your surroundings and not a creep
(2) That you’re not intending to eat up a huge amount of her time (we were encouraged to give an artificial time constraint for ourselves for this reason, even if it’s just “my friends are waiting for me”)
(3) That you’re not afraid of her or seeking her approval
(3) That you’re interested in her romantically (hence the compliment)
(4) That you’re also interested in her for reasons beyond her appearance (which required finding things out about her)
(5) That you’re someone with options; that you’re not desperate.
The wing girl calls were, because of the structure of them (you get exactly one simulated approach each week, and each one would be painfully, publicly dissected by Lynn afterwards,) paradoxically way more stressful than approaching girls in real life. I tried drinking a bit beforehand to take the edge off, but it didn’t help much; the last Wing Girl call I did (prior to my first bootcamp) featured Lynn chewing me out for people-pleasing verbal tics for probably about ten minutes in ways that were severe enough where I just stopped doing the calls.
(I scheduled a Zoom call later with her to ask her to tone it down in the future; to her credit she did so! Which was great because at the time I had already paid for a bootcamp that was to be in a few weeks and I was concerned it would feature a doom loop of me being anxious, Lynn chewing me out for being anxious, and this leading to even more anxiety, until I eventually BSOD in a corner somewhere.)
Other Group Zoom Calls Were Also There I Guess
They had other weekly zoom calls for things like “emotional releasing” and “just getting advice” and they were fine but I didn’t engage too much with them; I felt the point of TAM was to be a container for experience acquisition.
The TAM Bootcamps
The bootcamps were split between model work, daytime cold-approaching (that is: chatting up girls in the shopping district) and nighttime cold-approaching (that is: chatting up girls in the nightclubs.)
Our culture has an enormous amount of disagreement around “when it is okay for men to strike up romantically-flavored conversations with women they’re attracted to.” These opinions are all over the place, from “never, dating apps exist for a reason” to “bars and nightclubs, yes; other places, no” to “eh, everywhere is fair game, just don’t be creepy about it.”
As a standard-issue liberal guy I’d always figured that hitting on girls in public was risky and Verboten and would maybe get you cancelled. However, by the time I signed up for this dating coach service I had already realized that a lot of my perceptions and beliefs around dating were just straight-up wrong and that I needed someone to help recalibrate me.
Most approaches over my time in TAM were unremarkable; there’s a pretty low hit rate, maybe a 20% chance of any nontrivial or interesting conversation with any particular girl, and a lower chance still of anything romantic happening from one. Still, I had a fair number of interesting experiences!
Vignette: “Sexy As Fuck”
One of the first things Lynn had me do during my first bootcamp was in a nightclub. She said:
“Aaron. I want you to get a girl’s attention and I want you to tell her, slowly and intentionally, with full eye contact, that she is sexy. As. Fuck.”
“…really?”
“Yes. Actually, say it to me first. Say ‘Lynn, you are sexy as fuck.’”
“Lynn, you are sexy as fuck.”
“No, that was too fast. Take your time with it. Really feel it.”
“Lynn, you are sexy. As. Fuck.”
“Too much gesturing. Slow down even more.“
And a few iterations later, I had a Sexy As Fuck that was deemed acceptable and I proceeded to try opening with it and it… worked better than it had any right to? Instead of disgust, the two girls I said it to seemed shockingly into it; things didn’t go anywhere (one smiled and started to say something but was pulled away immediately by a friend, and one gave me a gushing thirty-second thank you before introducing me to her boyfriend, to whom I gave a fist bump) but I think the biggest update for me was the visceral recognition that my sexual interest was not intrinsically disgusting and necessary to hide at all times.
Vignette: Mexican Barfly
So one of the bootcamps (a 7-day one) was in Mexico’s Playa del Carmen, and me and a couple of the other guys were just wrapping up. A Mexican woman in her late 30s/early 40s walks up to the bar, clearly just a little bit drunk, and I tell her she’s sexy as fuck and her eyes light up and within a couple minutes we’re making out at a bench.
We chat, or try to, and the language barrier is very real; I can vaguely make out that she’s from Guadalajara and is apparently going through some shit because she talks a lot about how she wants to back someday because… something about how “friends always betray you” but “in Guadalajara people treat each other right”. At one point she suggests that I move in with her.
And about 10-15 minutes into this conversation (interspersed with light kissing), she says, my arm around her waist with her leaning into me:
“[indecipherably broken English] up to your room [indecipherably broken English] 200 dollars?”
Oops.
I was not really interested in hiring a sex worker, so I tell her that she’s absolutely lovely but I have to go catch up with my friends.
I think she was having a rough night; she really loved the compliments and it was adorable how enthusiastically she waved me goodbye as I walked away from the bar.
(I spoke to Matt, the coach leading this specific bootcamp, after the interaction and he said that sex workers don’t generally make out with people they just want to extract money from later; they also don’t typically drunkenly invite prospective clients to move in with them. He figured the money ask was just was opportunistic “worth a shot” kind of move and I probably would have been fine just saying “nah, I don’t pay for sex” and continuing to chat her up. Interesting!)
Vignette: Goth Makeup Artist
I get the Instagram of a goth Mexican girl who I chat up in the marketplace district; we chat for a bit and I try to get her on a date, but it turns out she has a boyfriend. Separately, it turns out she is trying to get a makeup business off the ground, and since Dei de los Muertos is the next day I pay her to paint my face because why not, really?
The face painting was well-done. I was pleased.
Vignette: Shop Girl
A girl is hocking makeup to tourists; I chat her up, and at some point she offers me a kiss in exchange for a candy bar. I acquire one from a gas station (a Milky Way), return, chat with her a bit more, and eventually asked for my kiss, which she declines (“I’m working”); I accept this and start walking away.
“Wait, what about my candy bar!?”
“There was no kiss!”
Later, I ate the candy bar. Delicious.
Connecting With Women
Connecting with Women was the one workshop TAM does which is model work only. Each guy who purchases the fancy Elite package gets to attend precisely one of these. No cold approaching, just ~6 hours a day for 3 days of mortifying vulnerability exercises with a 1:1 ratio of men to paid models.
I credit CWW with fundamentally reorienting my entire approach to human interaction, because Lynn was accidentally running the only social anxiety ERP course I’ve ever heard of to ever do really good prevention of in-the-moment reactive impression management in high-stakes scenarios.
Anyway, here is where I discuss what happened to me personally in CWW:
and here for a more mechanistic breakdown of why I think the workshop is organized the way it is:
The Culture
When you put a bunch of guys into an emotionally intense environment they’ll become close quickly and develop their own micro-culture, and this one had a few distinctive characteristics:
WILLPOWER ABOVE ALL
The TAM culture valorizes willpower. They unironically post memes like this one in the group chat:
To this worldview, the fact that cold approaches kinda suck to do isn’t an indicator that maybe you could find a different way to pursue your goal of romantic success: it’s an indicator that you just need to power through even harder. What, are you just going to give up?
There’s an idea floating around in the program that romantic success is earned by virtue of just getting those cold approach numbers up. Interestingly the non-cold-approach pieces of lifestyle advice that Lynn gave (take up dance, take up a martial art, fill your evenings with social activities) were frequently ignored, I believe to members’ detriment. Guys love paying ~20k for dating advice and then not taking the advice.
The TAM website even had a cold-approach leaderboard that would reset every month or thereabouts. One guy racked up over 100, which is nuts. I think he got dates out of this; were they good dates? Dunno. Goodhart’s Law strikes again!
Number Of Approaches = proxy metric for moral worth
Relatedly, there was a general feeling that if you weren’t doing cold approaching it’s because you’re too weak and fearful. Like: you want romantic success, right? Why aren’t you trying to get it?
I didn’t hide that I wasn’t doing cold approaches; I think I managed to avoid getting hassled for it because for several months I was doing ~15 hours of dance practice a week— I want to get good at dancing now, not in several years— and this was sufficiently-unhinged that I was given a pass. Lynn herself didn’t ever really nag me about not doing cold approaches outside the bootcamp context (I think she was mostly pleased as punch about the dance stuff.)
Burnout Is A Very Central Experience
Cold approaching gets you interesting experiences and practice at navigating interactions with girls you don’t know, but for most guys there’s a very grim ratio of “unrewarding to rewarding conversations” that makes guys bounce off them pretty hard. The men burning out on cold approaches is easily TAM’s biggest problem, and it’s a brutally difficult one to resolve because “cold approaches being central” is key to their business model (see FAQs for business model discussion).
Of the guys who ended up in my accountability group (three other guys plus me; we’d have weekly WhatsApp calls), all of them except me have gone through frequent cycles of doing lots of cold approaches followed by a couple weeks of burnout and depression before the next series of cold approaches. The reason I personally haven’t gone through those cycles myself is because I almost immediately identified that I do not want “approaching random women in public hoping to strike up a romance” to become a large part of my life.
The Attractive Man has, through fairly deliberate culture engineering, built a group where most of the members have come to strongly identify with performing an emotionally taxing chore as a ~permanent lifestyle choice. Whether you think this is “great” or “horrifying” depends on whether you think there is actually an endgame worth pursuing, or whether they have taken a reasonably useful pedagogical tool and turned it into an identity-defining obsession to its users’ detriment.
For Some Of The Guys Dating Was Not Really Their Main Problem
One guy had suicidal ideation. I had social anxiety. Another guy has been on a three-year jaunt around Asia trying to find a wife while being a digital nomad, and has become extremely depressed because his life was (and still is, I think) without any form of persistent community. One guy, about 3 months into a relationship, has his texting interactions micromanaged by a team of dating coaches (who aren’t TAM-affiliated, to be clear; I definitely know Lynn wouldn’t cooperate with this, and I strongly suspect that Matt would refuse to micromanage someone’s relationship because that is clearly disordered behavior.)
To her credit, Lynn did say it explicitly: “a lot of you guys need therapy.”
…But also, a lot of the guys seemed pretty high-functioning.
One is a successful therapist. One is the CEO of a company. A couple are software engineers. One guy I don’t remember the profession of, but he was incredibly articulate and charismatic and I couldn’t actually tell why it was he decided to buy into the program in the first place.
Unironic Pursuit Of The Masculine Ideal
TAM is not “culturally online”. They are deeply earnest and straight-up in their value system: you are a man; you want to become attractive to women; that involves pursuing masculinity in a very straightforward way; we will show you how to do this and provide you a microculture where this is rewarded.
One time we stood in a circle on the Mexican beach and each of us went around to each other guy and yelled at him “I don’t give a shit what you think about me” and this was emblematic of the general vibe.
Ways In Which I Think TAM Could Become Better At Its Stated Goals
They had a really good idea in the nightclubs.
They called it being Mayor Of The Bar: You were, before you got your first drink, expected to interact with at least ten people. Men, women, didn’t matter. Men are oftentimes much easier to chat up than women, because they are less in-demand; I think the TAM guys would have found their lives much easier and their attempts at getting laid far more successful if they broadened their aperture from “chatting up pretty girls” to “chatting up literally whoever and opportunistically hitting on pretty girls if they seemed interested over the natural course of chatting up literally whoever.”
I found men in bars remarkably willing to tell me their life stories.
TAM coaches felt like they couldn’t really help the men who just straight-up were unwilling to approach women, but I think actually the coaches should have been giving the advice to strike up conversations, real conversations, with men. Just to build up the muscle of initiating unsolicited chats so that they have a backbone of sociability; plus, the feeling of wallflowering is incredibly depressing. “I chatted with a bunch of other guys at the bar” is a way more fun evening story than “I sat alone for a while and left early to go to bed.” This was a common failure mode for some of the guys in TAM.
(At one point Lynn observed that a lot of the TAM guys straight-up don’t know how to make conversation and I think she was right.)
FAQs
Q: Wait, how much did all this cost?
All told, here’s the breakdown of what I spent on this thing:
$4,000 dollars for the first bootcamp.
$3,000 for the online course and weekly coaching with auxiliary coaches for 3 months.
$15,000-21,000 for the bundled all-you-can-eat-for-a-year monthly bootcamp + coaching calls.
So for me probably about $28,000 for the year of stuff, not including flights and hotels and such. I could have done the less-expensive 15k package and ultimately only shelled at $22k with very little meaningful loss of service; the extra money was for the ability to take further bootcamps, which I ultimately declined.
Q: That’s SO MUCH MONEY.
Yes! That’s BASICALLY a pretty good used car. My Mazda CX-5 I think cost $26,000.
What you are getting for it is a bundle of services that roughly correspond to ad-hoc exposure therapy and (sometimes) response prevention, plus 1:1 in-person social skills training, plus a social container that makes not doing the things more painful than doing them.
I had money to spend on personal development; given that’s the case, I think this was a reasonable way to spend it.
(I will say I don’t think much of the online TAM materials; I mean, they’re fine. But at its core you can get dating advice pretty much anywhere for much less; I think the true value add of TAM is the in-person components with the remote coaching as support infrastructure.)
Q. So, what did you actually get in terms of practical life outcomes?
My relatively-typical results: being able to flirt effectively with attractive girls! Also just being able to chat up random strangers in general; on my trip back from Mexico I spoke to a few people in the airport and it was nice! We had pleasant chats.
My extremely atypical results were an eventually-complete cessation of ~all social anxiety, as discussed elsewhere, which is worth many multiples of what I spent.
I think that even if Connecting With Women weren’t included then, for me, this would still represent fair value for money paid; but I’m also in a position where burning $28k on self-improvement is definitely noteworthy but not particularly life-impacting.
Q: Couldn’t you have just done the cold approach stuff for free?
No.
I have done probably 50-100ish cold approaches total in TAM and all of these were in the workshop containers, and I did them specifically because a peer group would have judged me for not doing them (and would congratulate me when I did). The money is for the social context to do the exposures, not the exposures themselves.
It costs zero dollars to stand outside the bakery and smell the cakes.
Q: Okay, but you could probably just make a free accountability group with some guys online and you’re good to go.
Yeah? And can you get them all into one place? And source someone to train you in how to effectively do the things?
“I bet you could do this cheaply (if you can source the expensive parts for free)” is a true statement, but not a useful one.
Q: What about an actually-trained therapist doing exposure therapy with you?
I’m not aware of any therapists who will do this kind of exposure therapy for dating-related anxiety, and I also suspect the field in general does a poor job at preventing the actual core compulsion: any form of trying to make this person like you and not-dislike you in the moment of conversation.
The Connecting With Women stuff worked only because of swift punishments for disapproval-avoidance behaviors in contexts that felt maximally high-stakes (pretty girls!) Lynn did, in fact, conceive of the problem in precisely this way, though hilariously she wanted to prevent the compulsion for, basically, a combination of moral and attractiveness reasons.
But it turns out that the Venn diagram of “social anxiety safety behaviors” and “behaviors that girls find to be turnoffs” is actually just a circle, and ERP therapy doesn’t care why you prevented the compulsion. The only question is: did you prevent it, or not?
(Note that the “sexy as fuck” line also counts as ERP because a common compulsion around expressions of sexual interest is to “hedge, leave a line of retreat, pre-apologize, try to get it over with quickly” and all of those things were explicitly banned. “You are sexy as fuck” leaves zero room for ambiguity as to the nature of the conversation you’ve just started.)
Lynn is not a therapist and does not claim to be doing therapy, and I suspect this fact is WHY she can run a highly effective exposure therapy and response prevention protocol around dating-related compulsions. Which is totally fucked, but here we are.
Not to say that Lynn was universally successful here; a common activity she engaged in during Connecting With Women (and TAM generally) was playing whack-a-mole with different safety behaviors performed by the guys in hopes that they would eventually crack the general principle, but this was sufficiently difficult that it mostly didn’t happen.
Q: So how close to pickup artistry was this thing, anyway?
Both Lynn and Matt were extremely invested in radical honesty as an approach, both on the grounds of ethics and of effectiveness: admissions against interest, if you do them confidently, read as highly attractive. They also don’t advocate being an asshole to girls in order to try and pick them up, and I think two concerns are almost all of what gave PUA a bad name in the first place.
I think TAM operates quite ethically in this space.
Q: Why do you think cold-approaching was such a big part of TAM?
I think it’s partly pedagogical and partly a business model thing.
Consider: hiring paid models to give feedback to guys directly is tremendously expensive— you’re paying them… I’m not sure what, exactly, but let’s say 30 bucks an hour. If you want to run a bootcamp where there are even half the number of models as there are paying customers and you want the models there for 8 hours a day, that’s 8 * 3 * 30 = 720 dollars for every 2 guys for the workshop. If you want a 1:1 ratio, that’s 720 dollars per guy, which is a meaningful percentage of what the men paid for the entire 12-month program writ large. That’s before you start getting into “renting a venue” or “paying the coaches for their time” or “paying your taxes.”
Whereas cold approaching is something one can have students do for free at any time of day. It also lets the more-skilled students demonstrate their skills to the newcomers; I got to witness some highly skilled guys strike up conversations with pretty girls and they were, in fact, quite good at it. It also has (as the psych nerds say) ecological validity, where success with literally random girls you’ve met on the street is demonstrable proof that you’ve learned the thing, which makes it a very organic sort of feedback loop for the TAM learning environment.
These considerations coexist with my skepticism of how useful cold approaching actually is.
Q: Why did Lynn leave?
No idea, but nowadays she runs a women’s dating coach company at a site called “LionEQ.” If you’re a woman with people-pleasing tendencies or social anxiety that you would like to be eradicated, I think Lynn is likely to be spectacularly effective.
(It is ironic that the most unambiguous recommendation from my review is for an unrelated service serving a totally different population, which I also haven’t used myself, but here we are.)
Q: Given that Lynn’s not still with the program, is it still worth it?
I think that depends.
I think the fact that the program is organized so hard around cold approaching means that you’re likely to get significantly better results from the program if you’re (1) not bottom-quartile unattractive (though this is quite malleable for men via muscle gain + getting a stylist), and (2) if you have the ability to have ~pleasant conversations with normal people as opposed to just with rationalists. If you struggle with one or both of those, a different service with a heavier model work emphasis would probably serve your needs better.
It also helps a lot if you’re extroverted. Signing up for TAM means signing up to have a lot of weird, unexpected experiences with an enormous number of men and women across all walks of life, and you might or might not learn the things you need to know from having those experiences. I selected that set of vignettes earlier not because they were especially good or especially bad experiences (though I did quite like the Mexican sex worker, I hope she’s doing better these days) but because I think they were representative: weird little inconclusive anecdotes where, just briefly in a very tiny way, I connected with someone.
If you view your core problem as being one of romantic skills deficits or about not being able to chill out around attractive women, then I think the median outcome of the course is significant but not earth-shattering improvement. I think my own improvement was an outlier because I responded extremely well to Lynn’s particular variety of ERP; I don’t necessarily think Lynn was load-bearing to the program (which is good because she left), since they’re still running Connecting With Women just with a different coach.
As a rule, I think that if you both (1) want to learn a complex skill and (2) have the resources, then it helps a LOT to purchase the services of a professional who trains that skill for a living. Dance or dating or martial arts, you’ll always do better if you have someone to explain what works, what doesn’t, and what are the most common mistakes made by newbies.
I met a guy during the program who shelled out probably-similar amounts and didn’t really feel like he got the results he came for. On the other side of the outcome bell curve, I would say that the top quartile of guys got reasonably good at cold approaching; if you aspire to both “chatting up random women in public” and “not being a PUA shitbird” this is a pretty effective program to accomplish that.
So the core of this question is: “would you like to exchange ~20,000 dollars and probably ~3 weeks of your time for, in expectation, moderately-improved dating-related social skills?”
Only you can answer that.
Q. If I *were* to purchase TAM’s services, how would I maximize the benefit of doing so?
First: When you’re in bootcamps strike up conversations with everyone. Men, women. Doesn’t matter. Talk to vendors in their stalls and actually buy something (vendors are people you want to be on the good side of, and also you are taking up space in front of their stand so it’s only fair.)
I am so fucking serious about this. Talking to men is valuable both because men tend to be down for conversation, AND because it gets you into a headspace where you’re chatting without pressing for an outcome. Trying-to-get-an-outcome is a bad habit that girls can smell on you, and you do not want this smell. The TAM coaches talk about this and recommend it and almost none of the TAM guys take it seriously enough because it doesn’t fit the TAM leaderboard culture.
Second: Get into the headspace, wherever possible, of “I am curious to see how this interaction lands and where this goes.” Trying for an outcome is crazy-making and anxiety-inducing. The experimentalist mindset is where fun lives, and ultimately where sexiness lives.
Third: On a practical level, I think for me phenibut was helpful in mitigating anxiety during bootcamps so I could do the exercises. Do your own research, and don’t take it more than a couple days at once because coming down from phenibut dependence is apparently awful (I am told sleep paralysis demons are often involved).
Fourth: Hire a damn stylist (Pivot Image is what they recommended me, and I found them to be excellent at their job). In for a penny, in for a pound: you’re already shelling out 20k at least on the dating coach and you may as well spend a few more grand on a wardrobe that actually makes you look good.
Fifth, get your testosterone checked. If you have low testosterone getting exogenous testosterone is cheap and trivial and makes you gain muscle much more quickly, which is huge for your physical appearance. This and the stylist thing are key because your physical appearance is important for making cold approaches actually go well, along with the actual taught skills, and “approaches sometimes going well” is the difference between having fun and TAM being an unrewarding slog.
Sixth: one way you can read my Metacognitive Therapy and Mind Control essays is as a how-to guide I wrote to my past self on “how to use Connecting With Women to resolve your anxieties around pretty girls.” If you do Connecting With Women (or model work more generally), I suggest reading those essays.
Seventh: Consider whether you actually want cold-approaching to be a part of your lifestyle. The program will attempt to push it pretty hard; it is non-obvious that you should lean into that.
Q. What should I be looking for in a dating coach?
I’ll be honest: I don’t think cold-approaching is particularly useful in itself (baseline compatibility with “some random girl on the street” is likely to be poor), and it’s mediocre as an exposure therapy tool because of necessity it’s not doing good response prevention. I think the thing that you really want is model work supervised by a coach, specifically, even though model-intensive dating coach services are fairly expensive because at its core you are hiring a girl to hang out with you for many hours 1:1 plus the coach’s time. Connecting With Women was the model-work-intensive part of TAM; it is not coincidental that this is actually what did it for me, I think, and it’s also not a coincidence that this is the workshop that each guy in TAM gets precisely one of.
I think Fully Known might have a model-work-heavy thing? I’m not sure, though.
Caveat emptor!
Q: Would it be perhaps accurate to say that the TAM program itself was “fine” except you happened to get bit by a radioactive spider during one of the workshops and now you’re Spiderman?
Listen, it is what it is.
Dancing, huh? You didn't feel like the odds of you meeting a compatible woman through dancing were low?
In this context, what are the benefits of taking up a martial art vs taking up dancing?
Also out of curiosity, how the hell did you find a) enough time, b) enough classes or whatever to add up to fifteen hours a week?