There is a man. On the internet. He seems like the most exquisitely crafted ‘nice guy’ beta fuckboy parody ever. Except he is real.
Nate is a self-described “Passionate Businessman” (capital P, capital B) who, lonely in his passions, has decided it’s time he found himself a mate. But despite the vigorous power of his entrepreneurial spirit, Nate is, tragically, an introvert. He also doesn’t like online dating apps, for reasons I’ll get into shortly.
Thus he created shouldyoudatenate.com. I am not joking when I say that it is a masterpiece, and I absolutely encourage you to read every word of this glorious case study in white male mediocrity if you have the time. But it is also very long, and while Nate is a fascinating specimen he is also not worth so much of your precious time just because he thinks he is.
Because there is a deceptive magic to Nate. I don’t mean the dark charisma of a sexually magnetic bad boy, I mean he really has the magical power to send you, with his website, into a lengthy trance of boredom. The deception of it is this: throughout the whole tedious life story, you are invited to feel a certain level of sympathy for his awkward, lonely soul, for a very long time, before he feels comfortable enough to reveal the extent of his douchebag misogyny.
Oh yes, there’s a professionally made video
The first thing all the babes visiting his website get to salivate over is the enticement, in large letters at the top of the page: “Why This 6’ 4” Passionate Businessman is Offering a FREE Dream Vacation To a Lucky Woman…”
Okay, yes, offering his suitors free shit in exchange for dating him is a risky start, not least because the weird capitalization reads like an overzealous job application that Stands Head And Shoulders Above The Other, Lesser Would-Be Baristas In This Town.
But Nate has the creativity to immediately humanize himself by showing you – and this is genuinely commendable – that he knows and is comfortable with how shy and awkward he is. It’s endearing!
Demonstrating his emotional range in the video (oh yes, the professionally made video), unassuming gentle giant Nate shows his heart and his teeth in the opening line: “It’s not easy for a woman to feel chemistry-” yes, sensitive, good “-when you reach out to some dipshit on an app with a bad description.”
Wham! That’s right, my dude, fuck dipshits, and you tell those lovely ladies right off the bat that you are something special!
Nate has taken his mediocrity and devised a cunning presentation to make it his strength
But again, he calls on his sweetness in time to keep you interested. “Hi, I’m Nate, and I wanna take you on a date.” He even simpers, almost giggling, and I wouldn’t blame you if you saw a boyish charm in it. Then, as if he’s on a reality show: “This is fun, and it gets me out of my comfort zone.” Again, his openness is immediately humanizing. “I have no idea what’s gonna happen!”
Admittedly, I started to entertain the possibility that this is parody after the bit in the video where he says “years ago I saw the movie Dumb & Dumber, and that was what first inspired me to come out to Colorado”. But it’s the kind of weird quirk where you still can’t rule out that it might be genuine. And though such an unpretentious reason to move doesn’t make him normal, it does makes him average.
That’s the thing about Nate’s awkward averageness; he reveals, to his credit, that he has the Samwell Tarly-esque courage to both see it and admit to it without flinching. Nate has taken his shyness, has taken his mediocrity, and devised a cunning presentation to make them his strengths. It’s an incredible tautology: he may be mediocre and therefore nothing special, and yet what makes him special is this very mediocrity! From the man himself:
If you’re interested in meeting someone who truly values you for YOU, loves to listen, and cherishes living life to the fullest just as much as you…
…then this might be one of the most intriguing letters you ever read. In fact, if you’re open to an exciting, fulfilling, love affair (with the right guy) then this letter might change your life.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.
It’s true that I’m offering a free, romantic vacation, so keep reading…
…but don’t get your hopes up
Because even though I’m offering a fun getaway wherever you want… chances are almost zero I’m the guy for you.
Even if you’re a healthy, beautiful woman who’s ready to feel the exhilarating chemistry of a truly deep, enriching relationship.
… you shouldn’t date me!
Nate is consistent with his self-deprecation, describing himself as a “recovering obsessed workaholic”. Hardly recovering, from the sounds of it – he warns us that “at the end of the day…do I go out to a party? A bar? Or even spend a quiet evening with a lovely lady, cooking dinner and watching a movie? Nope! I collapse on my bed… sleep… then leap right back up to do the whole thing all over again.”
He is the most boring man in the world, and he’s not afraid to use it!
Nate reveals he isn’t just an introvert but a bona fide cultural hermit. He has “nary a presence” on social media; he doesn’t care about sports (this is fine tbh); and he has only been to the movies twice in 7 years, but doesn’t even mention what the films are (perhaps they’re vintage Dumb & Dumber reruns). “Basically,” he boldly confesses, “I abhor the stuff 95% of the population obsesses over!”
This is his radical honesty, not just mediocrity but polished mediocrity! Nate really really wants you to know that he is the most boring man in the world, and he’s not afraid to use it!
His reasoning for why this aggressive boringness makes him genuinely interesting comes from his claim that all the other men are lying to you. Okay, so that might be true; but the whole point of us saying ‘men are trash’ is to observe their shitty social conditioning and then point out that it doesn’t have to be this way. Nate’s trick is to brand himself as trash that is a) honest about being trash (a la Joss Whedon) and therefore b) not as bad as all the other, less honest trash – you’ll get used to the smell, in your gratitude.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, they say, and so Nate is the alpha of beta males! Check out my dude’s sweet game in his own words:
If this were like all the “dating profiles” cobbled together by typical guys, it’d drone on and on about liking movies, sports, and all the other vapid drivel you may have been bored by a thousand times.
On Tinder, I only get to feature some pictures and 500 characters. Why the hell would I restrict myself to that?
Why the hell would you make your own entire website to publish your lame life story when OkCupid already exists? Whatever. The point is, at the start of all this Nate’s competitive edge was supposed to be that he’s radically honest about his own vapid drivel. But now that he’s got your, um – I want to say attention but really it’s your sleepy acquiescence – apparently he can now pretend that he’s not actually like those other men after all.
Finally he confesses that the only woman in his life is his mum
Why, Nate? At first you seemed so proud of your mediocrity, so keen to make it the centerpiece of your ‘honest’ personal brand. At first you seemed to cut out the middleman in order to celebrate your imperfections. But this abandonment of your feigned humility? This snake oil commercial? Now you’re just the Better Call Saul of disappointing white dick.
What, then, does Nate have to offer to his prospective lovers, who he demands form an orderly parade of voiceless dolls in his email inbox?
Sadly, we never find out. Because now that he has lulled you in with the gentle monotone of his Odyssey-length humblebrag, and talked all about his fascinating self, Nate doesn’t seem to want to know much about you at all. All he really wants to know is: how unobtrusively are you going to fit into this ghastly empire of unspeakable despair?
“Look,” he writes tetchily, “what I lack in ‘coolness’ is more than made up for in overwhelming ambition which propels me forward every day with more enthusiasm than the last.” What ambition, dearie? “To build a great career, huge businesses, enjoy sumptuous living, support my mom in style for the rest of her life, and make the world a better place through the marketing I do.”
Finally, a confession: the only woman in his life, now and forever, is his mum. She’d be ever so proud of her brave entrepreneurial boy if he brought home a nice girlfriend, which would be perfectly normal if only this wasn’t the entire raison d’etre of his sexual cosmos.
He helpfully provides a picture to make sure you know this is code for ‘no fatties’
And since you don’t matter, and only Mother does, we can move swiftly on to the requisite specs you must satisfy. In a section called “Things Nate does NOT want in a woman”, with a red background to warn you how serious he is, Nate reveals his terrifying vision for womankind. His list of horrors:
- “Dionysian divas”, by his account disgusting harpies who drink and smoke too much, eat too much unhealthy food, and generally have too much fun.
- “Exercise Atheists”, where he helpfully provides a picture of a curvy woman leaning tiredly on an exercise ball to make sure you know this is code for ‘no fatties’.
- “Lackadaisical Ladies” (why does he capitalize everything so much?), a classic womanly archetype from his sad fantasy universe, who apparently does nothing except watch TV show and talk about them on Facebook.
- “Prolific Partiers”, in which Nate describes the awful outgoing woman who would dare to give herself a social life to cope with how little attention he can be bothered to give her.
I can’t go without quoting in full my personal favorite (and the moment when Nate’s awfulness makes perfect sense):
- 5. “Prosperity Poo-Pooers. Don’t laugh. As a bonafide greedy capitalist pig, I’ve figured out that free markets and unfettered entrepreneurial spirit are the best things for this planet. And unfortunately, this idea shocks otherwise intelligent, healthy women. So let’s just get it out of the way now: If you’re dead-set on liberalism instead of libertarianism, our stars were not meant to cross.”
Libertarianism, the creationism of economics.
The libertarian prides himself on seeing in pure market logic the gorgeous liquidity of nature itself – and if you can’t see how good that is, you must simply be afraid of reason, and your criticism is a mere emotional response.
Libertarians loathe women because their mere existence disproves the entire thesis
The libertarian knows in his heart that there is no freedom greater than the freedom to extract surplus labor for profit. You might see bad things done in its name, but he tells you at every turn: ‘this isn’t capitalism, it’s crony capitalism, not like…’ And then he will evoke some ‘good old days’ of ‘pure’ capitalism.
But he doesn’t want you to press him on when or where he thinks that glorious age actually happened, because then whatever golden century he names can be prodded with unhelpful questions like “wasn’t that the same time as slavery?” or “what were British colonial atrocities if not big government intervention?” Please have mercy and don’t mention John Locke’s flagrant justification for chattel slavery in his seminal works. Please. The squirming would be unbearable.
And libertarianism loathes women. The very existence of women disproves its entire thesis. Adam Smith’s great observations of the ‘invisible hand’ of the market were facilitated by the tireless and thankless cooking and cleaning of his mother, in whose care he wrote his oeuvre as a grown-ass adult who couldn’t admit to all that labor he was extracting from the poor woman, for free.
The libertarian resents any implication that value might come from essential labor it doesn’t want to pay for – women’s labor – rather than merely springing from the ground when an entrepreneurial genius conjures it. Nate gets so defensive about it that he pre-emptively insults your criticism as necessarily stupid, calling you “otherwise intelligent” for being so irrational.
Who would write a 3,000+ word open letter begging you to fuck him and not mention sex once?
In a mindset where one believes all human activity is best decided by market logic, of course Nate’s offer of a free vacation is morally consistent. “We should meet and at least exchange a couple conversations before jetting off into the sunset,” he explains carefully, “but if we hit things off, feel an intense connection, and want to see where the future will take us, I’ll make it happen.”
There is no contradiction with his ‘nice guy’ shtick when he entices you with what is clearly a transaction, because it is reserved only for the woman he deems worthy of such a transaction. A whole moral universe for you to explore, orbiting around his junk.
To prove your market value, all you have to do is not have any hopes or dreams or interests that get in the way of his own. And not be a fattie. And not have a social life that doesn’t revolve around him. And not dissatisfy Mother. And let’s not talk about sex or whatever your annoying, irrelevant girl needs are. Because who would write a 3,000+ word open letter begging you to fuck him and not mention sex once?
A real nice guy.
Nate’s idea of a perfect woman is so impossibly limited that the only way to think about it is as a libertarian. You’ve got something he wants, and he’s got money. Though he probably doesn’t know it himself, it’s quite plain to everyone else that Nate is looking for a sex worker who is also a method actor.
If he’s got the material wealth you want, and you’ve got the tools? Drill, baby, drill! But as a woman, as a human being, if you’re actually looking for companionship: should you date Nate?
What’s the point? Nate clearly has no interest in dating you.
