Poker is a sadistically difficult game to learn. You can make a statistically good move and get punished for it when your opponent lucks out, or you can make a statistically bad move and get rewarded for it if the cards happen to fall your way. The edge a good poker player has is often very small. You’ll find yourself in situations where the odds of a given play winning are 55%, yet it’s entirely possible that you’ll lose 5 times in a row when making that play. You’ll be tempted to go home thinking that the play was a dud, but if you stick it out and try it 1,000 times then you’ll most certainly come out with a big pile of cash. Statistical advantages always actualize in the long run. But how can you be confident that your play actually has a statistical advantage, even when it lost the last 5 times you tried it, and even when everyone at the table is taunting “Hahaha bro, that’s a terrible play.”

Learning to navigate the sexual market place has exactly the same sort of pitfalls. It can feel random, and it’s hard to know when you’re actually doing it right.

You can be thin as a twig and still find a girlfriend. She’ll tell you that muscularity is overrated, and you’ll think “Well, I guess muscularity isn’t that important then. I’m not muscular and I found a decent girl, after all.”

The sample sizes you have in your every day life are often not significant enough to help you see the forest for the trees. It could be that your parents and two other couples you know have stable, outwardly happy, “good” marriages. Yet if you were to examine a sample of 100,000 couples, inside and out, you’d see how much of a dud modern marriage is, and how the couples you know are outliers.

Perhaps a few months have gone by at the gym. You’re in better shape now, so you grab some new clothes, groom yourself properly, and confidently and hit up your local night game. Over a short period you find three girls who you have solid chemistry with, but two are already happily taken and one experiences some traumatic medical event the day after you meet her. You feel like giving up, but you shouldn’t. The things you did to improve yourself really did give you an edge, you just haven’t played the numbers enough yet for that edge to actualize. Over small sample sizes results can seem random. You have to keep trying.