Passive Optionality vs Active Optionality
About The Importance of Being Visibly Competent
Orion Taraban’s The Value of Others is a book about relationships - how, when & why people enter them, how do they sustain them and why do they end them.
The book talks about the sexual marketplace using a lot of metaphors and comparisons from economic models.
From the book I have extracted seven most interesting ideas I got from the book.
The sixth idea I am going to tackle is the idea of passive and active optionality. Optionality is a situation where a person has few people interested in them sexually or romantically.
Women enjoy passive optionality. Because they exist there are men that are interested in them. When they are in bars or other social places they are approached. They have a huge number of people interested in having conversations with them on dating apps or similar.
This is not true in the case of men. Men are by default invisible and unattractive. They don’t have options. They need to put in work to have women interested in them. They need to act thus they can only enjoy active optionality.
The author of the book compared the situation of women in the sexual marketplace with the situation of famous people. These are equivalents. If a man wants to have options he needs to be visibly competent.
In his book Orion mentions that for men a great dating strategy is so called fishing that is leading to situations where women are approaching a man (indirectly or directly). However in order to execute this strategy a man needs to be visibly competent - otherwise a woman won’t be attracted or just won’t know about the existence of a man.
Examples of Being Visibly Competent
Being popular on Social Media - in the modern era it’s the easiest way to show the lifestyle and skills
Being loose and easy-going in social settings - having “swagger”, “vibe”. Shows huge social competence
Organizing great events
Participating in sport competition
Performing in music/theatre spectacles
Doing public speeches
Being great at dance
Being surrounded by attractive women
Showing above in pictures in dating apps