Advice For The Romanceless

I spent the first ~19 years of my life romanceless. I did not kiss someone until the end of my freshman year of college—though there were quite a number of people I would have liked to kiss before then. I know, I know, shocking; how could it be that one such of myself—handsome, humble, willing to talk for ten hours about anthropics (or, at the time, utilitarianism)—was anything other than a chick magnet, fiercely desired by all women within a 5,000-mile radius? In fact, I was told in high school by a friend in a grade lower than me that the consensus view in her grade was that I was asexual (why was there a consensus view about such a thing???)

Since then, I stopped being romanceless. I have now been serious relationships with two people, the second of whom is my current girlfriend, who also happens to be the #1 girlfriend in human history. Now I know that you’re going to object that I’m biased, given that she is my girlfriend; all I can say is that, as the debunking literature bears out, sometimes a first-order judgment is so plausible that you should hold that it’s true even in the face of a debunking account.

Scott Alexander, a while back, made the point that you should trust people more who didn’t start out great at a thing, but then got better over time. If you ask someone who is good at social skills how to be good at social skills, they’ll give predictably unhelpful advice. Thus, as someone who was previously quite incompetent at avoiding romancelessness, but who has improved to a significant degree (to the extent that, as purely unbiased analysis reveals, I am now dating the single most awesome girlfriend in the world), hopefully I have some useful advice. My advice will be mostly geared towards men, as I have more things to say on that subject, for obvious reasons.

I feel a bit bad paywalling this one, given that unlike most of the things I say, it might provide useful advice, but will paywall the substantive advice given that:

1. Some things must be discussed frankly, and I feel more comfortable frankly discussing some topics when the only people who can read what I’m saying are those that like me enough to give me some money.

2. If I have more money, I can give more to the shrimp, which is obviously much more important than trivial things like crushing loneliness. When I last wrote an article giving relevant advice, you people all paid me almost a thousand dollars—that’s nearly 15 million saved shrimp.

3. Discussing these topics is embarrassing. All else equal, I’d rather talk about other stuff, but I think this is likely more important. Given that, if I am going to write about such topics, I figure I’ll get people to pay me for it.