Take the Merry Pill
The Classic Courtship Key
As wizened old men, well into the golden senescence of our late 20s and even 30s and 40s, we steaders usually do not give the young ones dating advice. But this time, we're going to break the rule and say something that will be a benefit for men of all ages and marital conditions. In this transmission, we tell you to take the merry pill.
Men who are merry do better in courtship, are more likely to be married, and are less likely to be divorced. Merry Men obviously enjoy life more. So take the merry pill.
Archetypes
Everyone loves Christmas, the quintessential merry holiday. We hear that women love it too.
There are strong connections between being merry and successful teasing and giving off roguish vibes. Robin Hood and his Merry Men are the original model for the rogue, which is to say the safe bad boy.
Bad boy but safe? Courtship catnip. If you want to get an idea of what merry is, read the canonical Pyle version. Robin liked laughing and he liked laughing at himself.
Another word for merry is jovial. It comes from Jove, which is the English version of the name of Jupiter. Jove is the highest god, the father figure, but he is also jovial.
He's merry.
So being merry has strong archetypal power, both with being a rogue and a bad boy and with having
extreme patriarchal authority.
In both cases, what the merriment does is it makes the authority (Jove) and the unaccountable exercise of power (Robin Hood) palatable.
Merriment says this is someone who could be trusted to be in charge.
Even despite all the layers of acculturation at the base level of root instinct that a man and a woman share with a beaver or a frog, in courtship, his instincts and her instincts are saying that he is seeking to become her authority.
And how will that authority be exercised--with some self-awareness and the consequent ability to laugh at himself? Kindly?
The merry pill helps solve that dilemma.
Be Goofy
Goofiness is merry without authority, but even goofy guys, people who have no authority, clean up. There are plenty of dads who are doing fine just purely being goofy. They would be better if they had some real masculine weight behind it, if they went merry instead of goofy, but they're still doing okay,
as much as offends our sense of what is fitting.
If you have some real accomplishment or strength, then being merry is as easy as being goofy. Goofy + jawline + good 1 RM max = merry.
Steader comment:
My wife often says that there are two kinds of guys you can marry, adult men who are inwardly 16 year old goth emo teenagers, or adult men who are inwardly 12 year old boys. She says she's very grateful that I am basically an overgrown 12 year old boy. Yes, I told her, sticks are cool, and I don't care who says otherwise.
Be Funny
Being merry is similar to, although not exactly the same as having a sense of humor.
There's a man who has developed an approach to courtship for men he calls sexy hobbies. The idea is you develop hobbies that are fun and attractive to women, such as playing the guitar. They help you display mastery. They make emotional connections, they're cool, they're high status.
https://x.com/alpharivelino/status/1683143692008271873
https://xcancel.com/alpharivelino/status/1683143692008271873
Curiously enough, he leaves off his list being funny, which absolutely is a hobby that can be learned and is probably the greatest ‘sexy hobby’ of them all.
You get funny mostly through trial and error, although there are plenty of YouTube videos and books that can point out various aspects of humor. Feel free to steal jokes. The most effective humor, of course, is situational, but even telling canned jokes that makes people laugh makes them like you.
The best way to develop a sense of humor is first to practice on yourself. Make yourself laugh first.
In practice, humor isn't just a set of outside expectations that you can manipulate like an engineer. It's a social process that you have to participate in yourself. If you aren’t amusing yourself, you aren’t merry.
The second piece of advice is just to practice on others. The good news is that women are not wholly alien creatures. There will be some overlap between getting your bros to laugh and what will get a woman to laugh.
Seeing you make your friends laugh is attractive, even if she doesn't herself. It shows you have a sense of humor even if she doesn’t get it yet. It shows that you have allies, some kind of mastery and authority over other men.
There'll be some overlap between what gets your grandma or your sisters to laugh and what gets a girl that you're with to laugh.
Being willing to fail and shrug off failure is another requirement for being funny in a merry way.
One of the first things you should learn to do when you are being funny is to have a joke or two when the joke doesn't land.
Having a sense of humor probably has sound evolutionary reasons for women being attracted to it. First of all, it's a display of a kind of social mastery, an ability to read the room, understand social cues, have verbal intelligence--this would especially be true of situational humor—and emotional intelligence. No one really gets funny without taking risk and dealing with embarrassment, so it shows some courage.
In fact, humor, a person's sense of humor reveals a lot about their character in general. If you have bad character, that will show up in your sense of humor; if you are funny at all, your humor will be mean spirited, nasty, not self deprecating. There'll be something false about it. The good news is that character like humor is something you can grow.
There's another reason why you having a sense of humor, which always has to come from yourself, hits well. The type of humor that goes over well is usually an expression of joy. It shows in a fairly unfakeable way that you are enjoying being who you're with. You're relaxed and happy.
A woman, as the expensive fertilization sex, is by nature, at the root level used to people trying to get into their pants and lying to do so, including lying about liking her. And it's hard to tell if people actually genuinely like her, which she would like. Seems like that would make for a better lifelong partnership that way.
Inside jokes and shared humor is a standard mechanism for small, tight, knit human organizations such as families. Having a sense of humor shows that you'll make a good dad you or shows that you are already a good dad. There's a reason that jokes are associated with dads and not with bachelors.
You have to be merry, not just funny
There are a series of paradoxes that are found in a lot of religious traditions. They're in the New Testament=, they're called the dominical paradoxes. You see similar things in Buddhism, that in order to get a thing, you have to want it but not want it. And in order to try and impress a girl with your humor and with your merriment, you have to be willing to be funny for its own sake. You can't impress her if you are only performing trained actions in order to impress her, the artifice, the fakery, will always show through. You have to just like laughing. You have to love to laugh. That is the core of being merry.
Not every other piece of courtship advice out there is bad. Many are really good, but this is one of the best ones, and it's pretty easy to do, and it's just not very commonly given. It won’t seal the deal all by itself, but it will get you a long way there.
Be merry, be jovial.
Let out your inner rogue. Make yourself laugh.
Laugh at yourself.
Take delight in seeing her face light up.
It really is wonderful.
It’s your mutual heritage
Having a sense of humor and being merry is also Anglo American. Its in your heritage.
The English people, for a long time, have prided themselves on their sense of humor and have treated it as something to be developed and refined.
In the reign of good Queen Bess, a nobleman was being presented at court, and in the act of kneeling,
unfortunately, absolutely ripped out a stunning one, noise and odor, 10 out of 10. Never bean before you queen.
In embarrassment, he fled the court and fled the country for a while. After a few years,
he apparently missed England, or at least thought the hue and cry had died down. So he came back, and he's now at court again, and Queen Elizabeth says, “put your mind at ease, Sir Wossname, we have forgotten the fart.”
English and American humor even has developed futures that are extremely uncommon in the rest of the world, such as light hearted sarcasm and the non joke or the absurd joke, where the joke is, the subversion of the expectation of humor.
How many surrealists can fit in a doghouse? Pancake.
Merry Old England. You come from long lines of men who were hilarious.
Dating is supposed to be fun
The way courtship works in a modern setting also pushes in the direction of humor and merriment, and has for a long time, because although the ultimate purpose of dating is to find a relationship the actual act of dating is structured so that the immediate goal is to have fun, to have a good time, to enjoy yourself, to relax.
So someone who is better at helping the people to enjoy themselves and relax is going to be better at dating. Just the way it is. If the rules for courtship in our culture involved bride capture, guys who were better at riding horses would have better luck. But in our culture dating is a leisure time activity, and the purpose of leisure time is to have fun.
But no one likes my jokes
“But I'm a weird guy and I have a weird sense of humor.
There's basically three people in the world who get my jokes,
and they all have XY chromosomes. And two of them are my dad and my brother.”
Never fear. There's probably some ways that you can broaden your sense of humor, understand where people are coming from a little bit, translate what you're doing into a larger audience. To an extent, these are actually spiritually productive exercises. Sometimes you learn a lot about life trying to do that.
But the other thing to think of is that for humor, just like for pheromones, being individual is a feature, not a bug. For successful courtship and a happy marriage and lots of children, you only need an N=1 success rate. And the fact that this one girl really vibes to your sense of humor when other girls don't is actually going to make things better for you, not worse. Remember that in the West, and despite what many say, I tend to think in antiquity and outside the West, also, the point of courtship is not just to get access to a monthly ovulation which you can inseminate. The point is to form a union.
And the compatibility of your character and your souls is revealed many, many times, probably most effectively, through your senses of humor, just as the compatibility of your flesh comes in the smell and the chemistry.
But she only laughs if she already likes you
There is a feeling that whether she laughs at your jokes or not is 100% a feature of whether she already likes you. False. It helps, yes, and in this aspect helps you maintain attraction. Which is a good thing. It helps you figure out if you are hitting some attraction buttons, which is also a good thing.
But mainly its just false. This is something that people who aren't really funny say. When you get funny, you absolutely can tell when people are laughing because they like you. It’s obviously still great. It's convivial. You're all friends. You have charisma. That's a real laugh. There's real joy going on.
But you can also tell when you have just stunned someone, their whole face is transformed with laughter that's erupting out of them. You have reached down into their soul and twisted.
No More Buts
The good news is that the kind of woman who is most susceptible to the merry pill is the kind of woman who is most likely to be looking for marriage and wanting to have children.
