Psychologists tell us two things about how females choose males for sex. You can check out these findings in books such as Robin Baker – ‘Sperm Wars’, David Buss – ‘Evolutionary Psychology’ and Matt Ridley – The Red Queen. The studies reveal the following:

1. Females often use a short-term mating strategy

Masculine, dominant men come out well in this area. These are men who know their mind, have dominant facial and behavioural features, are extroverted and are physically well developed.

Of course not every man who is chosen has all of these traits but on the balance of averages, men with these traits tend to come out better for short-term mating than men who lack them. These men are good material for one night stands and for ‘here today gone tomorrow’ boyfriends.

2. Females often use a long-term mating strategy

Men who are caring, protective and committed tend to do well as choices for being long-term partners. These are people for a lasting relationship.

Bringing The Two Sides Together – Dominant Connection

Increasingly, I am moving towards accepting the need for an integration of these two sides of the attractive male.

As males we don’t have to be one or the other. By showing both long-term and short-term fitness traits – the aspects of how we act and communicate especially, we can have our cake and eat it.

In the past, before I got into the game seriously, I was very accepting of the need for connection. All the crap in the media was geared towards telling men they needed to communicate. I accepted that and shared my feelings in an overly-emotional way. After all this is what we are incessantly told that women wanted. Even women have their heads filled with this stuff in the magazines they read. Then when they follow the advice and find a caring, nice guy they inexplicably feel the urge to cheat on him with a bad boy.

My Swedish girlfriend didn’t react well to my increasing emotional connection and we became less and less close. Looking back, I was on communication overdrive, itself driven by that media based meme of ‘be nice and communicate’. More accurately, I was overkill because it became counter-productive and poisoned our relationship. But I didn’t know any better back then.

When I saw her withdrawing, I took it as an indication that I was not communicating enough or not doing it properly so I became even more emotional. Translate that as needy too. What was the result? You guessed it – she became even more distant. Things were not helped, but got worse between us.

Then I got into the game seriously in the late 1990s. I slapped my brain into action and saw my emotional connection was way to strong and I needed to exhibit more of those alpha, dominant, short-term attraction traits. And that helped a lot. I found I was getting good reactions and going out with girls. But as my relationships matured, I found myself going back to that overly-emotional way of communicating. I wrote about it once, asking for advice. The post was called ‘Reining In Niceness’.

The way to go, as far as I can tell, is to merge the two aspects and to be dominant AND connecting. Don’t overdo one or the other. You might have them at 50/50 as a base line then play around with them in differing ratios around that base.

For instance, you might have a 65/35 ration in favour of dominance in the early stages of meeting the girl. Then you might reducing it to 50/50 in a stable relationship once all the big shit tests have been passed and you trust each other. You might even take it to 45/55 in favour of connection. Who knows what is best – you have to calibrate for the situation.

For someone like me who tends to go for connection naturally and as someone who overdoes it naturally, I think a definite baseline of 40-60 in favour of either side might be a good way to go. I’m going to experiment with this over the coming months by consciously training my mind to be that little bit cockier with my LTR. I truly believe, based on my relationship experience that if you let the girl lead and don’t lead her most of the time, she’ll often lose attraction.

Assess your game, set your baselines and experiment sticking to them solidly.