How do I hack love?

I was late to the romance game myself. I think it all really comes down to confidence. You have to really like the person you are in order to be comfortable with yourself. Once you obtain that it is like a switch is flipped and women pick up on it and you will be the one getting hit on. You also will no longer be upset if people are not into you, you will know your worth and understand that there are literally billions of options in this world for you.

Also if you aren't very confident you are probably misinterpreting many signals that women are giving you both positive and negative.

My advice is get any mental coaching/counseling that is required. Hire a strength coach and get your ass to the gym. Learn to be good with money. Once you are a healthy capable human being love will find you. You may also go the other way and become a playboy lol, which isn't really good for your soul if you really want to settle down.

Of the people training on this topic, David Snyder is one of very few who is teaching mixed audiences of men and women. He's made many videos on Youtube about human communications and so far as I can tell he knows what he is talking about more than anybody:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvpsDBCOOps

almost everyone who is teaching to men is a bullshit artist who is exploiting a homosocial community of men talking to other men who aren't primary interested in relationships with women but are trying to raise their status with other men.

Another Youtuber I am going to refer you to is

https://www.youtube.com/c/AnaPsychology

How many girls have you asked out? It's a numbers game — you gotta encounter and proposition (not for sex, to be clear) as many women as possible both to learn the skills and to find the lady for you. Newbie salespeople are told to go get their first 100 rejections, and you're in the same position.

A good way to practice this is starting conversations with strangers in public. Say hi to people on the street. Smile at them. Make small-talk with the cashier. Get your social confidence stats up through trial and error — observe what works and what doesn't. Try various different openers.

For a zoomed out view of the game you are trying to play I recommend The Selfish Gene. The book is also the origin of the word meme.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1582881146/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch...

There's no shortcut to luck, which is 90% of love.

I was at your place when I was at your age. Years later, I marvel not only at how naive I was but the way this entire enterprise of "love" and "marriage" is sold to us by media and cultural traditions. Without getting too much emotions in the way, let me lay out few data points so we can be bit objective:

1. 50% marriages end in divorces. You walk in the wedding and you see happy couples deep in love. Happily ever after, right? Everyone thinks their love is unique and stronger than anyone else. It's like everyone thinks they are above average. Objective fact: There is no such thing as "love". It's just chemistry, biology and physics.

2. 93% of people who do remain in marriage for more than 10 years state in anonymous survey that they are unhappy and would have been likely better off with someone else or being single. About 100% of women in contested divorces describe their husbands as "abusive".

3. Vast majority of millionaire celebrity have not lost their fortunes because of bad business decisions, but because of divorces. You can get married anywhere but you can get divorced only in court. Marriage is a legal contract, not a cultural ritual or declaration of "love". Marriage is in fact the sneakiest legal contract that you sign without terms and conditions being shown to you. These terms and conditions keeps changing under your feet without any notifications to you (ex, you relocate). In my personal little survey, exactly 0% of people had any idea what the divorce laws are. When I told them what they actually were, they were shocked beyond belief. That's what all of them signed up for nonetheless. It's a legally binding contract and nothing else.

4. Never look for partner for purely romantic interest. There is no such thing as "soul mate". There is about 100% certainty that your partner would not share your interests or be your companion in your activities, no matter, how you started out initially. This applies even if you worked in exact same profession or have same educational background or did exact same activities for years. The shared interests and companionship delusion last for 2-3 years or maybe even 5 or 10 but that's really pushing it. Eventually marital relationship is strictly for procreation. Once that's done, things diverge over time. I have known dozens of married people closely and in every single case, I can tell you it was a massive drag on life, riffed with conflicts and barrier to personal development for everyone involved. If you don't want kids, don't waste your life looking for love and romance.

So please understand your need for "love" and "romance" is mostly driven by the hormones raging in your body. It's an illusion and unrealistic expectations for relationship in vast majority of the cases. There is estimated 7% of lucky people who probably have achieved that. Even for them, it remains of questionable value relative to those who just stayed single and lived a happy fulfilling life.

Finally, I would comment on one critical point. You are obviously self-conscious about your "looks" not at par with your cohort. You are hopping that your "brains" would hopefully fill in the gap to get you a partner. This is another lie sold to you by romantic stories, movies, music and media. This is so pervasive that it is super hard to see the truth. Just trust me that it doesn't work that way. Even if you "hack" the system and get partner, the relationship will not last for long term. You will only attract partners who consiously or sub-consiously worried about having resources, not you. The biology dictates that your partner would use you, enrich themselves and then eventually springboard to someone who gives them best of both worlds. In non-Western countries this outcome is often prevented by strict cultural norms but, in Western world, the family laws are not only designed to support this but even encourage it. This is why you see such enormous number of divorces. Even if you had "looks", the chance that your partner will still eventually betray you for another "better" one via affairs and adultary is about 50% in the Western world. I highly encourage you to sit in divorce proceedings for a day and I can pretty much guarantee you will never speak of "love" again. In most Western countries, these proceedings are public and, these days, even attendable by anyone through Zoom.

I would also highly recommend this book:

The Unplugged Alpha https://www.amazon.com/Unplugged-Alpha-Bullsh-Guide-Winning/...

This book would have changed my life for about 10X better if I had read it when I was your age and getting drowned in similar emotions.