Women commonly say that confidence is very attractive in a man and young men frequently misunderstand this because they think by “confidence” the women mean “believing that there is a high probability of success at what one is currently attempting.” Starting from this mistaken premise, they go on to notice that the people who most believe that their current endeavors are certain to succeed are swaggering fools. From this they they either conclude that women are self-destructive idiots, or are just completely confused. The problem, of course, is that this is not at all what the women mean. (There’s also a secondary problem that damaged women who were raised very badly tend to be attracted to men who were raised badly, and these cases supply evidence that this mistaken interpretation is correct. I’m not going to address that further, though.)

What women actually mean when they say that confidence is attractive in a man is that it is attractive when a man is rationally pursuing good goals, and both halves of that are intelligible to the woman. That requires some explanation, though, because the word “rationally” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. That’s for a good reason—wisdom and virtue are not easy in this fallen world. But it is, none the less, in need of elaboration.

The first and easiest thing to distinguish the rational pursuit of good goals from something that is obviously not confidence—desperation. Or, as Adam Lane Smith likes to put it, trying to get adopted like a puppy at the pound. There are different ways at arriving at this error, but they broadly fall into not having a good goal—usually, merely wanting someone to like you—or having a good goal but not rationally pursuing it: wanting a wife with whom to raise a family but snatching at any opportunity without regard to whether the woman would be a good wife, and not giving her any opportunity to find out if one would be a good father. I don’t think it needs much explanation why desperation does not come off as confident, but it will be helpful to look at the reverse: why does rationally pursuing the goal of finding a wife come off as confident?

Consider what the rational pursuit of that goal entails: the man needs to get to know the woman and to assess things like her wisdom, prudence, temperance, fortitude, patience, etc. At the same time, she will need to evaluate the same of him, and so he should be helping her to do that accurately. This will necessarily entail holding off from prematurely forming emotional bonds—it would be imprudent to become attached to a woman he may want to separate himself from, and it would be uncharitable to encourage her to become attached to him when he may wish to separate himself. Actually doing this requires willpower, but even more importantly, it requires conviction that the world is organized in such a way that the rational pursuit of these goals can actually lead to success. If the man is a Nihilist and believes that the world is merely chaotic randomness, it would not make sense to follow such a plan. But neither would it make sense to follow any other plan; if the world is unintelligible to human beings, if we are merely the playthings of evil gods, then following through on such a plan of action, with the restraint it entails, makes no sense. But here’s the thing: whether we are merely the playthings of evil gods in an unintelligible world or whether God is in his heaven and though his mills grind slowly yet they grind exceeding small, the only people who ever have long-term success are the people who follow rational plans. The people who treat the world like an unintelligible chaos always flame out after a while and usually flame out immediately. So if you want a life-partner and co-ancestor for your descendants to raise them with you, you really want someone who acts according to the conviction that rational plans are worth following. This is confidence.

Of course, confidence is evaluated according to many more pursuits of many more goals than just the pursuit of the woman herself, but especially in the beginning, that is probably the most obvious one to the woman. However, she will pretty quickly discover what other goals the man she’s evaluating as a potential husband is pursuing, and in what manner he’s pursuing them.

For example, how does he earn his living? While it is possible to approach that question in a mercenary way, it is a highly relevant question even to an ascetic who owns only two saris, as the nuns in Mother Theresa’s order do (two so that she can be clothed while she washes the other). Feeding and clothing oneself is not the highest good, but it is an important good and a noble and dignified pursuit, and one very much worth doing well. Even if a man is just a subsistence farmer, does he care for his fields or does he let them go to ruin? The answer to that question tells you quite a bit about the man and his convictions.

Does the man find anything in the world interesting in a manner worthy of an adult? To find something interesting takes work. This is related to an aphorism by G.K. Chesterton:

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

If a man finds nothing interesting besides games—which were made to interest him without effort on his part—it means that he has not taken the trouble to find interesting anything which was made for a reason other than to please him. Such a man will be a very dull conversationalist, and even more important, what kind of father can he be? If he has taken no trouble to learn about anything which exists for its own sake, how can he possibly know anything worth teaching to his children? How much will he even take the trouble to learn about his children?

I would not have the space to explain all of the possible things to learn about a man even if I were writing a book and not a blog post, but I hope that this has at least sketched out what is meant when (healthy) women say that confidence is appealing in a man.