If you have many women as friends you are doing something good and bad at the same time. The good is that you can meet women and can interact with them and can get them to trust you. The bad is that you somehow give off all the wrong signals.
Then you go abroad and you think the women are different, but they aren't. I have lived in three countries. You just have a higher value as an American man abroad. Ironically, this might result in you partnering up with a more superficial woman.
You should always strive to maximize your value in the dating market - any other strategy is self-defeating (note that you can settle after maximizing - that is totally allowed). That means you should try to meet women doing activities you excel at (relative to other people), demonstrating leadership qualities (giving talks at conferences, for ex.) or in GP's case, moving abroad. I'm not sure how the people you attract by doing these things are any more superficial than the rest; attraction to status-displaying qualities like this is built into the human genetics and goes way beyond intellectualization.
Basically we think that we are advanced apes, but in practice we're really very fancy peacocks with brains :) Note that social status/leadership quality is actually more important than income (there's lots of anecdotal data that women would prefer a doctor over an engineer making the same income, because of social connotations).
Women have plenty of ways of determining whether someone is genuine or not.
Some of the things have nothing to do with you whatsoever; this advice is merely about increasing the probabilities (i.e. card-counting in blackjack, if you prefer). A man living in NYC will have a better chance of finding love than a man in San Francisco purely based on the city that they live in - both could be very genuine people. The only thing different between the two is the ratio of men to women in the city.
We must remember not to attach emotional judgements to statistics.
Ratio of men to women (age 25-45) to save you a click:
Seattle: 1.5
San Francisco: 1.2
New York: 1.0
Chicago: 1.0
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How those statistics correspond to anecdotal stories:
"First off, to say that this is not an apple to big apple comparison is an understatement - it's comparing an apple to a bushel of apples. Add in the east bay, and NYC is only about 8 times larger then SF.
So, even without the gender skew, there are just a lot more women in NYC, and a lot more types of women. NYC is far far far more diverse on every axis / scale. There are also a lot more men, but since the population is way less self selected and homogeneous then SF, being a tech guy who makes good money is a big plus, not just average."
I should have also added this is more true than average for Software Engineers.
Specifically, as a partner, you have to ask yourself what you are bringing to the table in a given relationship; if the answer to that is income/stability, it would make sense that a struggling artist will appreciate that more than a solid well to do professional with their own income. If the answer is crazy parties (or whatever other flavor of fun), you might have an easier time trying to find a partner who has stability and wants excitement in their life.
Look, anyone can close their eyes and believe in fairytales. The advice I gave doesn't guarantee anything - it merely increases your chances of a favorable outcome.
If you have issues with the phrasing, read it as "make yourself into a more attractive partner" or however it is politically-correct to phrase the above statement.
Framing, it's the framing that's the issue here. Women can smell desperation from a mile away and this "Pick up artist" mindset will set off red flags for most.
Framing the dating world as "increas[ing] your chances of a favorable outcome" (i.e. sex) is only going to lead to disappointment.
Your advice might be statistically correct and I don't doubt it works for many, but for the individual deciding whether to heed your advice, N=1 and the probabilities are subjective when N=1.
Also your first sentence and your third sentence are pretty much contradictory.
It's true that probabilities are subjective. It's also true that dating market behavior is very sensitive to small changes in the gender balance since behavior is set at the margins (i.e. when people pair off, any dis-balance gets amplified)[1]
That's true at the scale of a city, and it's also true in small cliques. Just like in poker (the analogy I keep coming back to), the table and position you sit at (and who you're playing against) matters much more than your absolute skill at the game. And you might still lose - chance is still a part of it, no matter how hard you try.
"A ratio of three college-educated men to every four college-educated women may not seem dramatically skewed, but Jon Birger insists that, in reality, it is. He uses a musical chairs analogy to explain how a 4:3 ratio can create such a large imbalance. Birger explains that after people start to marry off, that ratio quickly drops to 2:1, then 3:1."
"For his first book, “Date-onomics,” Birger studied this phenomenon in the perfect control setting: college campuses. He found that when there are more women than men on campus, students’ dating behavior is oriented more towards hookup culture and less towards monogamous relationships. (When men are in oversupply, the culture is more monogamous.)"
"Pop culture programs, such as “Sex and the City,” tend to paint New York City as a haven for singles — a place where single women can surely find a match. But if you look at the numbers, this is far from reality, Birger points out. In fact, if you live in the 10001 zip code in Chelsea, Manhattan, 78% percent of 20 year olds are females (according to the 2010 census). Birger advises that college educated women may have better luck in areas where the ratio is reversed, such as Silicon Valley or Denver— dubbed “Menver.”"
Then you go abroad and you think the women are different, but they aren't. I have lived in three countries. You just have a higher value as an American man abroad. Ironically, this might result in you partnering up with a more superficial woman.