Intimate connections

What Hacker News says

1. openknotMay 2022
   >"Is my soul yearning for spiritual connection? I've got a good friend for that. My libido looking for an exhilarating one? There's bars and the ubiquitous 'more-than-friend-but-not-quite-committed' friendship we all seem to have but never seem to really look to for that sort of thing. The least lonely person I know is in his late 70s. He's always talking to someone whenever I see him."

   Academic research may be a good starting point. A 2021 study reports that ~29.5% of Americans aged 55 and older "were considered high in loneliness" in 2020 (source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34283657/). Loneliness was correlated with "those who reported depression, who were not married or in a relationship, who lived alone, and who were unemployed at the onset of the pandemic."

   Anecdotally, I found it unusually difficult to go to pubs for hookups when I was younger. I never once had a "'more-than-friend-but-not-quite-committed' friendship." I suspect it was partly due to race as an ethnic minority; there is an effect has been well-established from studies (source: https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/575352051/least-desirable-how...) that there are negative preferences against men and women of a specific race in online dating. Factors largely out of one's control, from ethnicity to difficulties with picking up social cues, can contribute to a lack of relationships.

   To connect this to the previous study, where loneliness was correlated to those "who were not married or in a relationship, who lived alone," it's quite possible that a significant driver of the loneliness in the United States the lack of committed long-term relationships between people.

   The search for a solution to a lack of relationships by an individual can lead to many dangerous paths. It can tragically lead to extremism and terror attacks (such as the 2018 van attack in Toronto, source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54895219). It can lead to people to join movements such as the "manosphere" or "female dating strategy," where they feel less alone with their problems, but pick up bad habits that make it far more difficult to have a healthy relationship. I believe that these movements have contributed to emotional abuse in relationships and sexual assault by people who push boundaries.

   A starting solution I recommend is this:

   i) Recognize that many people are lonely because they can't create romantic relationships, or even friendships.

   ii) Instead of isolating them or alienating them, figure out why they can't create these relationships. Are they in good psychological health (e.g. would they have untreated depression, anxiety, ADHD, or grief)? Do they have social skills? How can they access readily-available treatment methods from a reputable source (i.e. a competent and experienced counsellor, versus a dating coach who exploits people who are lonely)?

   iii) Building on the previous step, ask: are they economically secure? Can they find a stable job where they can provide for themselves, which can treat the root causes of potential depression and anxiety (which also helps them find relationships and friends more easily)?

   Each step can be very hard, but I believe this can help reduce vagueness to some extent.

   However, there are unfortunately many edge cases where these steps don't work. Examples include severe and persistent mental health disorders; people who want a relationship but struggle greatly due to a physical or mental disorder; or people who don't want to help themselves. For at least some of these people, some countries offer "sexual surrogacy," where a licensed counsellor eventually provides physical intimacy in a controlled environment (source: https://www.webmd.com/sex/what-is-sexual-surrogacy), but I haven't read enough about it to tell if it's effective. It's tougher for what to do with people who don't want help, though.

   For the individual struggling with loneliness, I would recommend focusing on improving the stability of one's own life and working on social skills without studying pickup artistry. Good resources for improving social skills without pickup artistry are typically written by psychologists or psychiatrists with clinical experience, such as "Intimate Connections" by David Burns (same author as "Feeling Good," a reputable book on cognitive-behavioral techniques). At the least, a focus on financial independence and stability can be a good foundation to working on the other problems in life, as it's harder to be happy and create meaningful relationships with money problems.

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2. clockwork123512Oct 2021
   I had a similar experience. The following was helpful for my unique situation, over the course of a year and a half:

   1. I consciously decided to stop processing the past and let go. Instead, I moved on to the opportunities I currently have. I adjusted social media to remove reminders of my past workplace (including muting old colleagues). The questionable professional networking benefits wasn't worth the toll to my mindset.

   2. Valuing myself a lot more wa helpful. I don't perpetuate the environment by by treating others unfairly for self-gain, but I avoid straining myself to help out others (where there's often no actual award or appreciation) unless it's mutual beneficial. I've found that a lot of people don't appreciate favours, and may even feel entitled to them from you.

   3. Boundary-setting was important. This includes revealing less personal information at work (it can be used against me, though I'm trying not to take it too far) and declining overwork when I can (in a tactful, graceful way). This led to cutting off a one-sided friendship (where I was constantly asked for favours and support without receiving it back), because boundary-setting was challenged and not respected. It was painful, but ultimately helpful.

   4. A shift in identity from my job to myself as a professional not tied to a workplace helped massively. I also started doing multiple projects, so negative problems at work don't affect my identity.

   5. I kept up healthy habits. This includes a consistent sleep schedule, avoiding simple carbs when I can for diet, exercise, and avoiding outrage-producing information sources, like low-quality news websites and especially Reddit.

   Due to additional time and focus, I started seeing someone in a fulfilling romantic relationship. I don't intend to reveal that past (I want to move on, as I'm a different person now). She's genuinely nice, too; she really enriches my life, though I'm avoiding repeating the mistake of tying my self-worth to anything external, including her. So, while perhaps I was the ideal, dedicated worker before, I'm still pretty good now, and happier with parts outside of my life.

   In short: I committed to moving on and letting go of my negative past experience to reduce distractions. I then fixed personality flaws that tied my self-worth to others (by consequence, I learned boundary-setting, which counterintuitively improved my relationships). I also earned a belief in myself again, by sticking to hard but healthy habits and making good, consistent progress in developing skills I always wanted to have.

   Last quick note: I got a lot of mileage from referring to "Feeling Good" by David Burns for self-treatment with CBT whenever I felt trapped by negative thoughts. "Intimate Connections" also by Burns helped me for relationship advice, which helps with enjoying the present.

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3. mettamageJan 2020
   Edit: sorry for the long comment, but my username is partially a result (the metta part) for going through a period of having low self-esteem.

   Tal-Ben Shahar Positive Psychology [1], it's a Harvard course and self-esteem is one of the lectures. It's old, but the big ideas that changed my life are there.

   So based on that course you'll want to learn about meditation. I've got the right book for you from a Google engineer who made sure most of it was evidence-based [2].

   Obviously you'll also realize because of the course you want to pickup aerobic exercise.

   David Burns is my favorite psychologist (I read Intimate Connections from him, his claim to fame is Feeling Good). He has an answer to your question, which is Ten Days to Self Esteem [3]. Though, when I read the reviews you might just want to get one of his other books. I'm a fan of Intimate Connections, other people are fan of Feeling Good. You'll definitely learn a lot about cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT changed my life.

   And what the heck, not sure if this counts towards your question, but it's at least related to it and good for the soul. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl [4]. What's interesting about his book regarding self-esteem is that he basically invents half the field of positive psychology 50 to 60 years before it even exists. Also, it's just mandatory reading for any human being IMO, but that's again IMO.

   Then, some personal advice that I've seen to work.

   You need to be brutally rational and empirical about self-esteem. I know one programmer friend and I noticed that he wasn't able to do that. What I noticed was the following: HE DIDN'T TEST HIS ASSUMPTIONS! Yes, that warrants a caps because I told this to him every single time and it didn't get through to him. So, do find your assumptions and do some experiments.

   Some experiments I have done in the past:

   1. People are mean. Experiment: walk up to 10 people and say hi and see what happens. Result: people say hi back, and the pressure of not saying anything sometimes caused a conversation to happen which was fairly pleasant. In other cases it was awkward. In conclusion: people were never mean.

   2. Stating to a woman that you want to kiss her doesn't work. Instead you have to make the move. Experiment: when I feel I have a bond with a woman [a] and I want to kiss her, then state it politely and leave it at that, repeat every 2 hours (if you still feel that way and have been fully platonic otherwise). Results: to my surprise, every woman kissed me. Heck, some just kissed me out of curiosity despite feeling no attraction to me. Weirder still, one of those curious kisses was one of the best kisses we both had in our lives. Note: I didn't ask any random woman on the street to kiss me. If the constraints of [a] weren't satisfied, I'd feel too unsafe to kiss her, and in almost all cases wouldn't even want to kiss her.

   [a] Minimally 3 hours of intense talking about life, ourselves, our families, hopes, ambitions, the works, preferably 6 hours. This excludes having fun. Without getting a feel about someone and without feeling a strong connection, kissing feels a bit too dangerous for me to do. Since I had low self-esteem I wanted to feel safe.

   3. I am not attractive. Experiment: go up to 30 people for which you want to be attractive to and give them a survey. Ask them at least: from a scale of 1 to 10 how attractive you are, and from a scale of 1 to 10 how attractive you could potentially be and what you'd need to change and why it would make you more attractive. While I didn't do this experiment, I have had enough feedback about my attractiveness. Long story short: I think I'm not that good looking (I have a scar on my face since birth). But most people that I want to be attractive to find me actually quite attractive. I've also been called ugly enough times, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I think a strong moderating variable is whether you simply click with the other person in that moment.

   What I've learned by experimenting: my assumptions and ideas about social interactions and dynamics are terrible. Sometimes I was right, most of the time I was quite to horribly wrong.

   Other advice I want to give:

   (1)

   Self-esteem / confidence is knowing about understanding what you are afraid of and then understanding what success looks like, a successful failure case looks like and a horrifying failure case looks like. When I learned to ski this was crystal clear.

   Successful case: I am able to turn, break and go straight.

   Successful failure case: I am about to ski of a cliff, but I am capable of falling right now to break. I know that by falling it won't really hurt that much and I won't injure myself.

   Horrifying failure case: (I had this one as a kid) you ski towards the ski lift and while at full speed you realize that you're going to slam into the ski lift row and you can't break (and can't realize that falling was a good option). Helloooo hospital, how are you? :D

   Pick the topic and map out these 3 cases and try to find ways to make horrifying failure cases into successful failure cases. In the skiing example: if I just fell down before slamming into the ski lift row, I would not have gone to the hospital. Back then I didn't know that falling was relatively painless.

   (2)

   My self-esteem issue had to do with romantic relationships. What I learned was that if I was capable of giving me self love and didn't need a relationship, but see a relationship as the cherry on top, then life is awesome! And it was. One attitude that really helped with that was: treating life as playful and as positively as possible. I got all my relationships where I realized that I'd like one, but I didn't need one and I didn't crave for it. I learned how to kill the craving (thanks meditation).

   So yea, hope this helps.

   [1] I found a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8qpn6kNfPc&list=PLF6A3AC0B7...

   [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12921211-search-inside-y...

   [3] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19295.Ten_Days_to_Self_E...

   [4] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4069.Man_s_Search_for_Me...

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4. mettamageJan 2020
   I read Intimate Connections from David Burns (author of Feeling Good) and while it was after my low self-esteem period, I thought to myself "if only I had this book, it'd have taken 2 years less."
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5. mettamageJan 2020
   Edit: that's it. I'm writing a dating guide soon. I'm seeing this too often on HN.

   --- original post ---

   > I am equally unlikely to ever find a partner who would want children with me.

   I've had this issue for 6 years (between 16 to 22). I was heavily involved with the pickup artist community at the time. I wouldn't call myself a pickup artist, since what I do isn't picking up women and it isn't an art. I just used whatever good advice they had lying around and used it. After 6 years, here are the cliff notes (I studied psychology as well, so you can bet this has some science behind it).

   - The most important advice: only take advice you understand or are curious about and test whether it works for you. If it doesn't, that's completely fine. Advice in getting relationships does not have a one size fits all solution. Maybe this will be the case in the future, but for now, no one figured it out yet.

   - Learn cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Read David Burns Intimate Connections and Feeling Good.

   - Learn Mindfulness Meditation and other forms. Read Search Inside Yourself by Chade Meng-Tan.

   - Finding a therapist is always a good idea. They can second those books and they can second CBT.

   - Strength + cardiovascular exercise helps (strength for body posture, running for mental sharpness). The best way to get into this IMO is to simply lift a weight a couple of times until your heart starts beating a bit faster. Then when it is beating faster, notice how you're feeling slightly more in ecstacy than before (other than some slight muscle fatigue).

   - Fix your fashion. A good fashion doesn't win women over. It is appreciated though. A bad fashion does let them run away. If you don't want them to run away, stay safe, have a good fashion.

   - Read up on assorted mating theory and try to find women that are compatible with you personality-wise, and ask yourself where they'd hangout or how you'd recognize them. I was into artsy types, so anyone who looked like an artist, I'd introduce myself to. I have a high openess to experience, artsy people tend to as well. Do a big 5 personality test (no mbti/myer's briggs nonsense).

   - Be careful with pickup artist advice. It's toxic and sexist as hell. The sexism is bullshit.

   - This stuff is hard work. I have a friend who has slightly better looks than me (I'm not a pretty person, I'm average at best), but he has no initiative. His dates / relationships are far and few in between. I do think he's enjoying life though.

   Those are my biggest tips, most are also quite science-backed.

   Some personal findings:

   - Getting a girlfriend won't fix your life. You need to take care of your own problems. The only thing it does, it enriches your life.

   - You need to come from a place where you feel like you don't need a girlfriend, but it would simply be nice or fun or adventurous (or whatever positive emotion you can think about). The best way to do that is to cater to every single need that you have as much as possible without needing someone else to help you with it.

   - You need to make your intentions clear as soon as you know them. I sometimes do it when I see a woman. I do steer clear from cliche's. If I think she's hot as hell, I try to mention that in its most eloquent form (e.g. I'd say she has a nice fashion sense, amazing energy and cute -- I would then go into specific detail). This makes things a lot less complicated. Be respectful about it. I always asked for permission to kiss women, verbally. This goes straight against pickup artist literature, but I found that it worked enough of the time and at least I had a good feeling about it to get verbal consent.

   - It is a numbers game. You need volume, but if after a 1000 approaches you haven't even felt a real connection and kissed someone, you're doing something wrong and you need a coach. The problem: most coaches suck. The only one that I know is good is called Ratisse (personal experience but I was already nearly complete in what I needed to learn).

   - You can be yourself. Except, you must also be: positive, optimistic and playful. Other than that, you can be yourself.

   - You'll have more success approaching women by yourself than with friends. Reason: you're less threatening by yourself, and convey more open body language. The hyper charged version of this is traveling alone (warning: it can be tough at times, just meet people at hostels. If you don't know what to say then just introduce yourself to a group of people at hostels with "hi my name is <name> what are you guys doing in <place/country>?" And have a story ready as to why you think the country/place is genuinely amazing, don't fake the story, just tell a story from the heart. This does the trick often enough.).

   - Try to come up with a method of dating women by focusing on your strenghts. Do this as fast as possible. My weakness: lack of humor. My strength: a shit ton of fantasy. My solution: approach women with fantastical stories that I'm making up out of thin air.

   - It's the inside that counts, not the outside. The outside is fun, so are drugs or video games. But a good personality means guaranteed amazing sex no matter how she looks, so IMO looks are irrelevant even from a hedonic perspective. I've been with good looking women, but the best sex I've ever had wasn't from a good looking woman. The most amazing intimate moments didn't have any correlation with looks either (sometimes they were good looking). The only thing I had was that I became less insecure after having slept with a few good looking women (and ultimately realizing it was all nonsense).

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6. antonpMay 2011
   Odds are your last sentence was a figure of speech, but I will go ahead and post this as a reference: "Intimate connections" by David Burns is a well regarded book on the somewhat related subject of building relationships.

   http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Connections-David-D-Burns/dp/...

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