So right there, by having a shitty attitude, you’ve functionally cut yourself off from 99% of the ways of meeting new potential partners. Warm approaches are out because you have fewer friends who can connect you to their social networks.

Worse, pessimists deal with greater levels of stress and anxiety. It takes longer to bounce back from failures and mistakes, meaning that their performance takes an even bigger hit over time. That stress and anxiety also has a negative connotation with relationships- the higher your levels of stress and anxiety, the shorter and more contentious your relationships are. This is one of the reasons why lawyers have among the highest levels of divorce among other professional careers… and law is one of the few careers where being a pessimist actually means you perform better.

Optimists Are Right, Too

Now let’s contrast this with optimists. Optimists, on the whole, are happier and healthier. Just as pessimism is a signifier of poor performance – socially, athletically and professionally – optimism coincides with greater overall success. In fact, MetLife found that optimists sold 19% more policies than their pessimistic counterparts in one year; by the second year they found that the optimists outperformed the pessimists by 57% (. ). Their secret is almost pathetically simple: They believe that life, on the whole, is good and that they personally will succeed at what they set their minds to.

Now to many people, this sounds less like optimism and more like out-and-out delusion. After all, studies have shown that pessimists tend to have more realistic assessments of their own abilities. A continually positive outlook seems downright insane.

Except it’s not about a Panglossian belief that this is the best of all possible worlds. O they have two key factors working in their favor.

The first key is that that optimists have greater emotional resiliency than pessimists and do better when faced with difficult, even adverse situations. Optimists aren’t living in a world where they see nothing but unicorns shitting rainbows and farting cotton candy, they’re simply willing to keep trying.

Even online dating gets handicapped by a negative attitude – there’s nothing like seeing somebody whine and moan in their dating profile to make a woman “nope” the fuck out

Pessimists believe in the futility of their actions – their problems are inevitable, irreversible and ultimately the result of their own personal failure or weakness. The virgin who believes he’s too old to have sex, for example, assumes that every woman ever will see him as flawed or damaged. Thus, he is unable to lose his virginity, leaving him permanently “disadvantaged” – he becomes afraid to date for fear that women will discover his shameful secret. He won’t approach as many people and he’ll be quicker to bail because he thinks he’s getting rejected even when he’s not. And if he does get shot down, it reinforces his self-limiting beliefs around his status as a virgin chechena mujeres para el matrimonio, serving to perpetuate the cycle in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Optimists, on the other hand, respond more positively to adversity. Instead of assuming a universal nature to their difficulties, they tend to believe that problems are temporary, impersonal and ultimately conquerable. That belief that a problem can be overcome means that an optimist is more likely to continue making more attempts until they succeed and not get thrown by failure. An optimist who gets rejected, for example, tends to de-personalize and de-universalize the situation. The problem isn’t that all women are stuck-up bitches, it’s that this woman didn’t like him for some reason; another one will, so he just has to go find her instead. Her rejection isn’t personal, it’s just that she’s having a bad day or that he reminds her of her ex-boyfriend or she was gay or any other number of reasons. And if it was something he did, then he can try again later and do better the next time.