After several days of watching it grow I finally decided to read this thread and it made for interesting reading. A couple of things occur:
I'm a nice guy and that fact has, generally speaking, made my dating life more difficult than it needed to be. Luckily my dating life ended a long time ago thanks to a fortunate encounter with the lovely young lady who, after several years of dating, became and remains my wife. BUT, over the course of our long relationship, I've loosened up a lot around women. Thanks to me being married, I was no longer "in the hunt" and I became a lot less concerned about what other women thought of me. I don't try to go out of my way to be rude but I don't abide stupidity and I feel free to get into an argument with a woman if I disagree with her.
What I've learned is that women seem to engage a lot more with men who challenge them rather than ones that act like fawning doormats. A number of the women who I've had these altercations with have made it more or less clear that they find me attractive.
So I guess I'm kind of saying that Teflon Billy is onto something but I might soften his delivery a bit and say that (IMHO) you don't precisely need to "be a jerk" in the sense of going out of your way to be rude or nasty (though there are plenty of women that respond to it). Instead I'd recommend that you just don't take any crap from them that you wouldn't take from the average store clerk, simply because you are trying to cozy up to them. Don't agree with everything they have to say. Express your own opinions about stuff and give the impression that you believe your thoughts and ideas are at least as important as hers.
The reason for this is pretty simple: Sicophantic "yes-men" are just about the most useless thing on the planet unless you need somebody to pick up your drycleaning or go wash your car. Being challenging and confident shows that you are somebody that will be interesting to be in a relationship with.
The real problem is that there is almost no way to get to Confident without getting in the game and Hida seems to be able to find almost any reason at all not to actually engage in any of the social activities that are required in order to gain some level of experience and therefore confidence. You can sit around and theorize and contemplate and wonder about the intricacies of flirting, dating, sex and human relationships until the cows come home. You'll learn a hell of a lot more about your own skills, confidence, strengths and creepiness in a night of flirting at some bar or club than you will reading this thread, helpful though the intentions in it are.
To put this in terms that a gamer can truly appreciate: If you buy a new computer game, you can read the manual for hours and hours but you're never going to get a real understanding of how it plays, whether you're any good at it and how you could get better until you pop that baby into the CD drive and get started.