The Countere Guide to Modern Dating
The conditions of modern dating have made genuine human love and connection all but impossible. Singles feel shunted into apps where creeps, liars, and mediocre individuals fester; young people, especially young men, lack the will to make the first move; no one believes in romance anymore. That boy refuses to give her the respect of a relationship. This girl will always be in love with her first. Everyone comes with baggage.
It doesn’t have to be this way. It became this way because of the utter lack of guidance around sexual mores that were established over thousands of years and torn down in a generation; yet few would argue that the Sexual Revolution made relations between sexes any better. Instead, we got more divorces than ever, more unhappily childless women, more man-children, and incels. Today, 67% of daters say their romantic lives are not going well, and 75% say it is difficult to find a quality partner. “Free love” didn’t work; there is a direct, causal arc between the Sexual Revolution and the #MeToo movement. Even the New York Times has finally conceded that “sex-positive feminism became a cause of some of the same suffering it was meant to remedy.”
A new day must dawn. The answer isn’t to burrow further into the weasel hole—insisting that what we really need to do is to invent new genders and smash the patriarchy—but to re-emerge from our shit-stained tunnel, take a deep breath of air, and start digging somewhere else. The Anti-Sexual Revolution has begun, and it is led by women. Some people call it “neo-prude,” others “sex-negativity,” all we know is that a new paradigm is needed in dating. As Mehreen Kasana writes:
“[Young people] are beginning to understand…fundamental truths that benefited their elders, such as there are indeed differences between male and female mating strategies (sorry, feminists), that there is something corrosive about being sexually indiscriminate (both biologically and spiritually speaking), that visualizing end goals for a relationship is far better than dating indefinitely without a common dream, that sexual restraint has its advantages, that monogamy puts necessary constraints on female fecundity and male aggression, and that it is on average better to start a marriage and family during one’s biological youth (sorry, coomers).”
It is on this vessel that we alight. We don’t know where it will take us, but we must stay on it—it is, quite simply, a matter of life and death (Kasana cites the research of J.D. Unwin, who found that “unbridled sexual culture leads to the breakdown of society after three generations almost always”). Some parameters could be sketched. We believe that in this postmodern dystopia, romance is one of the last wells of magic accessible to most people. We believe that strong marriages nurture the next generation of life and that dating is a means to this end. We believe in love. We know what we are not: nihilists, atheists, hedonists (save for the crypto-libertines among us).
By candlelight, we assembled the following text. In both the astral and virtual planes, we communed with a collection—a consortium, if you will—of men, women, Chads, Stacys, r/FemaleDatingStrategy Redditors, lifters who’ve gone their own way (LGTOW), Islamic scholars, queer theorists, doomers, bloomers, boomers, and zoomers, who contributed their best dating advice so that we could forge an acceptable guide for the people. At last, our document has been revealed, and we are ready to present it to the world.
Editor’s note: We use “man” and “woman” as archetypes in this article—as that coupling is actually what produces life—but we here at Countere are accepting of all people and don’t believe biology should restrict anyone who wants to ascend. If you want to be gay and trad, by all means do so.
Why Date?
Funnily enough, the answer to this question is actually often “Don’t.” Dating without a “common dream”—marriage, kids, a homestead in Arcadia—creates the most miserable of modern creatures: the played-out, baggaged millennial who’s had a string of years-long relationships (five years, three years, eleven years) with absolutely nothing to show for it. Far better to not date at all—to end relationships expediently—so that when you finally do meet “the one,” you can give them the world. Otherwise, you’re just dating because you don't want to be alone, which only makes sense for older people.
This is all very serious. We won’t cite studies that show that your marriage partner is by far the most important decision in your life, the one person singlehandedly affecting your career, family, mental health, and quality of your old age. What we will do is state one of the most obvious human truths: deep down, we’re all looking for love. Ancient wisdom holds that a human being is only complete with their other half. But to find that person entails sacrifice, commitment, and creating emotional space for them. Which brings us to our next point….
[Uncomfortable Slut: The Dark Side of Polyamory]
Your Past Decisions Affect Your Future Partner
We want long-term relationships, but most people today are unfit for long-term relationships. Relationships require emotionally mature people with tangible qualities beyond being hot: cookin’, cleanin’, listenin’, home improvin’, bass fishin’ (just kiddin’), and being willing to compromise and improve. A relationship is like a job, and jobs have responsibilities, and those responsibilities often—not always, but often—correspond to gender roles. To be worthy of being a partner, to be worthy of someone’s sole fidelity and allegiance, you literally need to be everything for them: protection, providing, feeding, nurturing, sex. Which means when you’re single, self-development is huge and crucial. A committed relationship shouldn’t be an impetus to grow up; it should be the karmic reward for having grown up.
Attractiveness is temporal; we evaluate our partners on their past, present, and future. A new relationship isn’t a clean slate. This is a lie fed to us by liberalism: that no matter our past, we can always wipe it clean with a new relationship, new city, or new career. No. Our past is our shadow. Every decision you make affects your future partner. This includes how well you have developed yourself before meeting them, but also your dating history and reputation. Hollebuecq writes about one such woman in our “sacrificed generation”:
“She had certainly been capable of love; she would have wished to still be capable…but it was no longer possible…Véronique had known too many discothèques, too many lovers; such a way of life impoverishes a human being, inflicting sometimes serious and always irreversible damage.”
If you feel your stomach fluttering, or the lump in your throat rising, and this seems too cruel of a metaphysical conclusion—the possibility that you have already foreclosed the possibility of finding lasting love in your lifetime due to hedonism and trash behavior—then stop reading now. (Redemption is always possible, but that channel goes through God, not Countere).
This irreversibility extends to men; only groupies want community dick. Society has deceived guys into dragging their feet on settling down, when in reality, they race biological clocks of their own: most sperm banks will not take donors past their mid-30s, as sperm quality greatly degrades with age and leads to increased risk of autism, schizophrenia, and disabilities. Real female empowerment is not just landing a highly desirable guy, but a highly desirable guy who’s not a degenerate, who’s willing to give his woman the ultimate sacrifice and marry his youth with hers to create something lasting and beautiful.
Real G’s Move in Silence Like Lasagna
Finding a highly desirable partner with a miniscule body count in 2021 is almost impossible. And there is actually an argument to be made that prior relationships can provide depth and color to our current ones. We suspect it may be particularly healthy for a man to have his heart broken at least once, in a “man-up” moment—when he realizes his girlfriend is not his mother, will not love him unconditionally, and that he must fight for his future relationships (nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by the woman).
It’s a joy to not deal with romantic baggage or messy exes who linger in your partner’s life. If you’re going to have fun—one-night stands, casual dating—keep it discreet and keep it classy. Countere contributor Gustavo Pierre tells us of an ex-girlfriend of his—a beautiful, successful entrepreneur—who made sure that every boyfriend she had lived outside her home city, so that no man in her vicinity could tell somebody that he had slept with her. This might sound crazy to some, but in reality she was tapped into an undeniable, basically biological human truth. She was also off social media. As Lil Wayne once said, “Real G’s move in silence like lasagna…”
Stop Watching Porn
Don’t be a Coomer.
Porn destroys your brain. You can read more about this here, and learn to quit here. While porn is literally harder to quit than heroin, and you will stumble, use this a guiding principle, and your life, relationships, and sex life will all become better. We guarantee it.
[Inside the Twisted World of AOC Deepfake Porn]
Make Sure the Values Align Before You Fall In Love
Sex is superglue. There are so many relationships today that should have never happened: what happened is that a guy and girl met on a dating app, had sex the first night, released some of the most powerful hormones a human can feel, and decided they wanted to get to know each other. Some of these couples marry or have children; it may take years for infatuation to fade and for them to realize they have completely opposite views on child-rearing, their politics have evolved, they don’t even share the same God! It is shared values, not sexual chemistry, that dictate the success of a long-term relationship.
In the movie Watchmen, there’s a hauntingly beautiful scene where Dr. Manhattan describes a night at the fair with his girlfriend: “It is July 1959, and I am in love,” he remembers over the ethereal bells of the soundtrack. He wins her a stuffed animal. She kisses him. The next moment is in a blue-lit room. They are in bed. “That night, we made love for the first time,” he says.
This scene, and sequence, is alien in the modern world. Even waiting past the third date to hook up would make you the butt of jokes among your friends. People will make crass jokes about needing to “test drive a car” before buying it, they will comment on the size of penises and “good pussy” vs. “bad pussy” (never mind that emotionally intelligent people can figure that out without having sex), they will mock and demean those who says things like “I only have sex in a committed relationship.” This is because to these people, there is nothing special about sex—in fact, every effort is made to strip it of significance, to reduce it to a bodily function no better than pissing or shitting, a ritualistic, regulated exchange of fluids, a social form of masturbation.
We dissent. Sex is sacred. Every act of intercourse is charged with the potential of creating life. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure that your values align—at least the big ones—before you cloud your judgement with physical intimacy. Sex should strengthen your relationship, not start it. Imagine, for once in the modern world, getting emotionally undressed before physically undressed; imagine knowing you love someone before they ever slip off their clothes.
Dating Apps
Read our lips: we could never hate on dating apps. They’re an inextricable part of the matrix and a boon to introverts. They’re a good way to meet people when traveling or moving to a new city. People do fall in love from them.
That doesn’t mean they’re not a festering jungle of cringe. Dating apps widened the gendered consequences of the Sexual Revolution, and all sorts of horrific phenomena climbed out of that gap: on dating apps, 80% of men prefer 18-23 year olds; racial issues are exacerbated (70% of Asian women go for white men); access to an infinite pool of partners discourages commitment of any kind; and an entire industry was created around normalizing and navigating traumatic behaviors like ghosting, submarining, zombie-ing, and so forth. Besides, only a small slice of the population—about one-third of men and women—use dating apps. By restricting yourself to one channel, you’re cutting yourself off from an entire swath of the population who are probably loads more interesting than those on dating apps, and instead limiting your options to the the most promiscuous, damaged, and BPD-afflicted wedge of society. Deleting all your dating apps is almost always a step in the right direction.
Approaching People
So, you’ve deleted your dating apps. What now?
It’s time to learn the art of asking people out. Most men claim that their biggest problem in dating is approaching women. We’re not just talking about walking up to strangers—although that, done in a gentlemanly and respectful manner, with rejection never taken personally, can actually be a huge turn-on to a girl—but signaling interest in our acquaintances, our friends’ friends, and so forth. Don’t just weakly ask to “get coffee” (beta move), but be clear about your intentions. Drinks or dinner are good codewords; if in doubt, just say “it’s a date” and watch if they recoil or not (there’s your answer). If men fail to learn this skill, which has to do more with courage than technical ability—the most salient skill here is just smiling—and instead burrow into dating apps where all the magic is rinsed away, they will leave the 70% of women not on dating apps to be approached by the 1% of men who actually have the balls to approach women.
However, perhaps in our post-#MeToo paradigm, where men have legitimate fears to avoid asking out their co-workers or classmates, women can step up a little more to signal their interest in a guy. Many women underestimate their own powers of seduction; lots of guys will immediately fall for any woman who buys them a beer and gives them a wink. Just remember, kids: nobody ever fell in love without being a little brave.
Ditch the Intersectionality
You can have your politics, but if your ideology enables you to win arguments with your partner on the basis of race or sex, you’re not a victim, you’re a manipulator. Using identity as a cudgel in your relationship precludes the possibility of true unity and understanding. We all know the POC leftist girl who only dates white men. One cringes imagining their conversations: “David, I’m worried about your ability to raise children of color…” “David, you’re a white man…” “David, don’t be so fragile…” Maybe David is an ignorant goat, but just don’t date David then.
[The Countere Guide to Spotting NPCs]
Have No Type
People who have types are psychopaths. We’re not talking about people who find straight blonde hair or dark skin or tall men attractive; we’re talking about people with long strings of partners who all looked the same way. It’s cringe and weird that Alexis Ohanian only dated black women before dating Serena Williams. These types of people are either race fetishists or are fixated on their “first love,” looking for traces of them in the hair or skin color of their new mates; both conditions essentially require deception to your partner about why you’re really together.
Far better to have mental types: to look for loyalty, kindness, drive, intelligence. The only thing that’s going to want to make you stay with a partner forever is what’s inside of them. Beauty, bodies, hairlines, all that stuff fades and recedes. Besides, studies show that familiarity breeds attraction, and anyone whose ever fallen in love knows that getting to know someone’s soul can make them infinitely more beautiful in your eyes.
How to Date
Dating is an art, not a science. Composing a great date with someone requires emotional intelligence, emotional sensitivity, and a little courage. Planning out a long, labyrinthine date—a steak dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town, a visit to an ice cream shop followed by a local art gallery followed by a jazz club—is great if you’re already dating, but if you just met over OKCupid, it’s completely beta. Keep first dates, especially blind first dates, short and respectful—with room at the end to improvise. Real romance lies in spontaneity: in the meandering streets of the city, on the trespassed shores of the moonlit beach, in the flickering of the house lights letting you know that you’re the last two left at the bar. 9 times out of 10, the “nice guy” who painstakingly programmed an entire extravaganza, upon failing to impress his date, responds with cringe—demeaning her over text, Venmo requesting her for half the money back, bitching about her lack of gratitude.
Men Should Pay
This brings us to our first rule: in 2021, men should always be okay with paying for the date. Some incel Redditors will gripe about how unfair this is, but in fact, it’s the essence of chivalry—which was important a thousand years ago and will be important a thousand years on. Being a gentleman is all about giving without expecting anything back: offering a helping hand in lifting a weight, reaching a shelf, opening a door, or paying for somebody. (It’s only simping if you keep doing it for someone who’s clearly not interested.) Some women nowadays will insist on paying, which is an attractive and charming quality, although it can also be her way of signaling this is the last date. Overall though, men should always be prepared to cover the bill; resentment over having to pay is a very weak trait.
Making a Move
With experience and emotional intelligence, it’s not that hard to tell if somebody’s into you. “Fuck-me eyes,” flirting, unnaturally long eye contact, all are real social apparatuses. Unfortunately, many people—especially men who watch too much porn—are becoming worse at reading these signs; compounding the issue is the vast amount of social noise discouraging men from ever making a move at all. (Leaning in and breathily asking “Can I kiss you?” is not attractive to most people).
Attractive people can get away with a lot more in terms of flirting without making someone uncomfortable, but a good rule of thumb for anyone is to slowly escalate: get closer, voices more hushed, the brush of a hand, and continuously assess the situation. Let’s say you’re on a date, sitting side-by-side at the bar; your knee is now touching her knee—does she recoil or does she push against it as she giggles? Pick-up artists call this “kino escalation,” but for people who had normal high school experiences, this is as instinctual as smiling. If you make a move and realize you’ve erred, apologize, laugh it off, and don’t take it personally.
[An Interview With ‘Incel Whisperer’ Mike Crumplar]
Being a Good Listener
There are few things sexier than being a good listener. We’ve heard horror stories of women going on five, six, seven different dates, without a single question asked of them by their male companions. Obviously, don’t just listen to seduce someone; listen because you’re genuinely interested in getting to know someone who could be your life partner. Oftentimes, you’ll find that in conversations where you mostly listen, the other person will say something at the end like, “Wow! You’re really interesting!” As a wise girl once said, “Being attractive for guys is easy: just be really good at something and ask really good questions.”
Save Something
This is the most actionable part of this entire guide.
Wedding nights mean nothing today. The couple has already done everything, there’s nothing to explore, no heart plummeting to the stomach—just have sex and get it over with. Once upon a time, and in some religious communities to this day, the wedding night would be the first time you touched a member of the opposite sex outside your family. This may seem antiquated, but it’s a clever hack of the pair-bonding hormones that flood the brains of young lovers, a custom designed by the elders to create sturdy marriages that can bedrock a society.
Our desire when we fall in love is to be in the most special relationship that our partner and us have had. That obviously takes time to build, but no one wants to be with someone who gave their best, their youth, everything to their ex. When we let our idea of love be clouded by bitterness, detachment, and superficiality, we have turned ourselves into used goods.
We’re not talking about saving your virginity for marriage—while an admirable commitment, most people reading this no longer have that option. Maybe you’re a girl or guy who’s slept with a lot of people, but closed your heart to all. Maybe you’re planning to only move in with a partner once you’re married. Maybe it’s the end of a long period of abstinence. Maybe it’s the phrase “I love you.” Maybe it’s children. If you’ve already been married, maybe it’s just true love. People who’ve blown out every avenue of pleasure in their brain with drug binges and orgies, people on their 20th relationship or fourth marriage—these things have an impact on the possibilities of lasting love. These people have nothing to give to their partner that they haven’t already given somebody else. Phrases like “I’ll always love you” and “I’m committed to you” can’t really be trusted when they come from such individuals, can they?
The idea you can “have it all”—that you can be a degenerate and eventually find a pure, committed relationship—is another myth engendered by modernity. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is pretty much entirely about this zero-sum rule of nature—about a man who tries to be both husband and ladies man and ends up never being able to be good at either. We encourage everyone to pick a side while they still can…
The Golden Rule
Don’t date someone for more than a year unless you plan to marry them. That is the golden rule of dating. Don’t waste the prime years of a girl’s life. Don’t waste the prime years of a guy’s life. Be intentional about who you sleep with, who you date, and what your long-term goals are. And don’t be afraid to break up.
The One
In this guide, we may have made it seem like “the one” is a single person, barreling towards you as a matter of destiny. However, we don’t believe in that type of “the one.” There is no single person out there who checks all your boxes, shares every one of your values, and also gives you the best sex you’ve ever had.
Our philosophy is that time and commitment make somebody into “the one.” We believe there are multiple “ones” you meet during your life—good people, uncannily similar to you, that you just happen to feel a flickering, mystical connection with. You’re never too old, and it’s never too late to find love. You can’t hurry it. You can certainly fumble it. If you keep believing, keep putting yourself out there, and keep working on yourself, there’s a high likelihood that lightning will strike. And when that moment happens, make sure you’re ready for it, and hold on for dear life.
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