AMOGing the not-a-date

In Chapter 7, "The Direction of Purity" of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Josh Harris writes:

God calls us to the same zeal for righteousness in premarital relationships. What exactly does that look like? For me and many other people I know, it has meant rejecting typical dating. I go out with groups of friends; I avoid one-on-one dating because it encourages physical intimacy and places me in an isolated setting with a girl.

Commenter LDiracDelta explains how this works in practice:

Sure, a borderline stand-up comedian with charisma oozing out of him can use a "group dating" strategy, but not a future engineer. I knew I had to peel the ladies away into one-on-one dating as I was/am never going to be the life of the party.

This would be a specific example of how Harris's lack of empathy for men further down the status pyramid manifests itself. Because of his physical attractiveness and social dominance, Harris found it easy to AMOG the "groups of friends" after-church get-together's he attended in lieu of dating, and here, without really thinking about it, he experienced abundant adoration from hypergamous females. That's not to say that every woman he met regarded him as a suitable romantic partner; after all, a woman's head doesn't always follow her loins. But it is to say that a woman's head doesn't go where her loins haven't gone first, and Harris personally never had to concern himself with a woman's loin-iness as a primary obstacle.

Dirac's insight is that this is pretty fundamental to the psychology of one-on-one dating: it creates space for men who will never AMOG the "groups of friends" to build attraction with a specific woman.

Parenthetically, as I was thinking about how my experience with female friends differed from Harris's, it occurred to me that those experiences were the same in one respect: we both were only friends with girls who were attracted to us, irrespective of our attraction to them. That's a shame, but it's not necessarily a complaint: a number of writers have pointed out that a woman's social aversion to lower-status men can save us a lot of time in the long run. We men, while limited in our choice of potential friends, are free to select among them for amiability rather than attractiveness.