A question about the “serial dater” type.

I’m Paper Airplane, a male member. You may not be the type to sleep around, but if your standard is: > continuing to see a woman once every month or two, only at hotels, then it’s basically like using a convenient escort service as your benchmark. If that’s your standard, it’ll be difficult to find women who exceed it—and it could also come across as disrespectful to them. I feel you need to think of seeing someone two or three times or more a month as a relationship. With your current arrangement of meeting once every month or two, it’s really just seeing someone occasionally—not a relationship. It means she only wants to meet that infrequently and doesn’t want to go anywhere other than a hotel. You may need to make offers with the mindset that you’re looking for someone new to date.

Maezawa from “The President’s Office” here, too. The definition may vary from person to person, but what came to mind was someone who’s almost like a sex worker—once things get intimate, it’s over—and whose allowance is low.

I’m Basil, a male member. I haven’t been reading everyone’s answers lately, so I don’t fully understand the context behind “playing the field,” and I can’t really define it. But like the person asking the question, I’m the type to keep several women in the mix while continuing to make offers in search of someone even better. This club’s policy is the opposite of focusing on just a select few, so as long as it doesn’t cause problems, I don’t think having more offers is a bad thing for either the club or its female members. Even if it ends after just one meeting with a low allowance, it simply means she wasn’t as good a match as the women you already know or may meet in the future. That’s common in society in general, not just in relationships arranged through a club. You don’t have to let yourself be influenced by the negative-sounding phrase “playing the field.”

I’m Kazu, a male member. I don’t really understand what it means either, so I assumed “using women up” might refer to dating women in ways that don’t feel satisfactory or worthwhile to them. But I think not having enough appeal to continue seeing someone is a two-way street—women also have the right to turn down men—so I don’t think the person asking is the type to use women up. What exactly counts as dating someone in a way that isn’t satisfactory for her? I wondered if it meant haggling over the allowance, but that would either prevent the relationship from developing in the first place or cause it to end, so I don’t think that really qualifies as an unsatisfying relationship. I can sense that the person is trying to criticize something, but what exactly they mean by “using women up” remains a mystery. So I’ve decided to ignore comments like that as a kind of masturbation: “I have good manners, but all the other guys are ill-mannered.” If it’s just masturbation, commenting on it would be rather gauche. Besides, answering questions here is basically a form of masturbation too.

I’m Date◎Yume, a male member. I think what the “Gentleman of Intense Papa-Katsu” meant by “eating your way through them” was that, even though this is a dating club, we shouldn’t make offers out of mere curiosity. We should make offers to women we genuinely think, “I really like her.” It goes without saying that, as male members, it’s difficult—not only at dating clubs—to take care of someone afterward after having just one adult relationship (intimate). That’s precisely why we should try not to make women feel they were “played” by some older guy who should know better. I think that’s what he was getting at. Paper Airplane once said in this Q&A box, “This isn’t an offer club. It’s a place for dating.” I agree completely. Rather than simply looking for a woman who is compatible with us in an adult relationship (intimate), I think we should look for someone with whom we can have a comfortable relationship and enjoy being together. However, when you’re looking for that kind of woman, finding someone who is truly a good match is incredibly difficult. So I suppose that inevitably leads to making offers one after another. When you first join a dating club, an introduction fee is charged. Compared with continuing with someone you’ve already met, you have to be prepared for a considerable expense. Even so, if you make an offer, perhaps you should reflect on the fact that you made an offer to someone who required you to go to such lengths to find a new partner, and use that experience to inform your next offer. Mac also mentioned “mistresses” as they existed up until around the early Showa period. Although dating clubs have their basic rules, I sometimes think that, as Japanese men, we should keep that sort of thing in the back of our minds while participating in club activities. If you understand all of that and still make an offer, I wonder whether it can really be called “eating your way through women.” There are also discussions about haggling women down or offering a low allowance. But I do think it’s reasonable to offer roughly twice the allowance you would normally give for aftercare dating from the first through the second or third meeting, both as a way of saying to the woman, “Please check our compatibility,” and as an indication that you’re not just playing around. Saito once said in this Q&A box that “continuity is what matters.” Of course, women would prefer the allowance for each adult relationship (intimate) to be as high as possible, but there is such a thing as the going rate, and I think things eventually converge toward that rate within the broader framework. If that’s the case, receiving ongoing support over a long period is much safer and more reliable, and ultimately brings in far more than having numerous one-off arrangements over a short period. At the beginning, you don’t know whether the relationship will become long-term, so I do think it’s reasonable to offer a special bonus in addition to the introduction fee, keeping in mind that it may turn into a series of one-off arrangements with multiple women over a short period. However, the question becomes whether the woman can accept being told, “From the fourth meeting onward, the allowance will be cut in half.” In general, I get the impression that many women are overconfident, and that the situation often ends up becoming one where the man receives a poor response and is forced into having numerous short-term, one-off arrangements.

I’m Tetsu, a male member. Everyone sees things differently, so I can’t make a definitive judgment, but I don’t think the way you’ve been dating recently qualifies as “sleeping around and leaving a mess.” To me, that means a man who ignores the woman’s feelings, gets what he wants, and then says goodbye. Meeting people is all about fate and timing. If you don’t want a woman to be used and emotionally worn down, you simply need to make her an offer before that happens. If you couldn’t do that, it just means the two of you weren’t meant to be. People who treat women that way probably aren’t the type to value those connections.