Emotions

I’ve been relistening to Nassim Taleb’s wonderful book Fooled by Randomness, which is a probabalist’s dream read. And if there’s one thing that picking up girls turns you into, it’s a probabalist.

Reading it (or listening to it on audio, as I am), you see a great many parallels between stock trading and seduction. And you also come to understand why some men succeed at picking up lots of different pretty girls, and why most men never will.

In many things in life, but especially in trading and in pickup, there is what you’d call an asymmetric distribution of returns. And that means that by participating in trading for stocks or picking up girls or anything else with an asymmetric distribution, you’re opening yourself up to asymmetric returns.

But the mind does not take well naturally to asymmetric returns. It doesn’t grasp them. It isn’t built to work that way.

And the result of this is, an endless abundance of great returns for those few souls willing to go against the grain, fight the emotions that go with it, and chase down their asymmetric returns in spite of their struggling and fearful or frustrated brains... and an endless source of frustration and disappointment for the majority of souls who just go with the flow.

As a student of psychology who worked in the field for years, I have arrived at the belief that the single most important predictor of behavior is context. By this, I mean the immediate environment surrounding the behavior – the people, the atmosphere, and all sensory input streams.

I mean, think about it for a second. Doesn’t it sometimes seem like you have a different personality depending on who you’re with, what you’re doing, or where you are? Have you ever done something, then looked back at it later and thought, “That just wasn’t me! I never do stuff like that!”

It’s almost like there was someone else controlling your actions, because the truth of the matter is that... it was a different personality. It was just as much “you” as the “you” you like to think is “you”, but it was simply expressing a side of itself that you had never experienced before. And, if I had to guess, I’d say you were in some kind of special circumstance when that happened… weren’t you? Maybe you were on vacation, maybe you were intoxicated, maybe you were hanging out with people with whom... for some reason, in that instance, it just seemed like an okay thing to do. Right?

So, as with nearly all phenomena I encounter in my journeys and adventures, I asked myself the question... “How can I use what I’ve learned to improve my sex life and the sex lives of my special lady friends?”

In the comments section of the 2013 “Year in Review” article, Nate asks:

“Chase,

This is a bit random, but can you do a post on astrology? Lately i’ve been fascinated by how accurate zodiac signs can be and the possibility of it showing how compatible you are with certain personality types. Obviously there’s gonna be some exceptions, but from what I’ve noticed they are often dead on. It would be interesting to see how well they correlate or if they just create some weird prejudices.

I’ve seen you mention it in a few of your posts and just wanted to see your take on it.

Nate”

Yes – astrology. Something almost everyone has a strong opinion about one way or another; it’s wonderful, or it’s rubbish.

Yet, however you feel about astrology, it is a fascinating little subject in-and-of itself... and it’s one that’s pretty darn fascinating to most of the women you’ll meet, too.

Something I see guys doing that always makes me want to hold up my hands and go, “Wait! Too extreme!” is getting miffed and walking away from women without giving them a properly put-together parting shot.

I was guilty of it for a long time, and when you’re still being emotionally affected by the women you’re meeting (i.e., before it’s become more or less pure process with little emotional involvement), it’s pretty easy to fall into this trap.

That is, the trap of realizing that things aren’t going your way with a given girl, getting upset, and storming off out of the interaction with a spiteful “Huh. She’ll realize what she’s lost when I’m gone!” attitude.

Ever do this? I bet you have, and if you’re like most men I bet you sometimes still do.

Thing is, how often do those girls you abruptly cut contact with like this ever get back in touch with you and turn things around? Never, right? Occasionally they may reconnect with you, but ever notice how they treat you rather patronizingly in those cases? They know they’ve gotten to you.

At best, all you ever get out of ending things with girls this way is a psychic victory... you get to think to yourself that you “won” because you walked off and left her hanging.

But you didn’t win, not really. You didn’t get the girl.

There is a way you can though – not all the time, but a whole lot more often than you will with the “get irked and storm off” approach, in any event.

I call it “the parting shot.”

A little while back, Chase wrote a fantastic article on competition between men and women in the 21st Century. If you haven’t read it, read it here: "Conflict Between Men and Women in the 21st Century."

In this article, I’m going to expand on Chase’s foundation and look deeply into whether or not women actually want to be treated like equals by men. There has been much talk in our ever-changing society about gender equality, so most men assume that being treated equally in every respect is exactly what women are looking for.

But is that actually the case? Let’s dive in…

In the article on precedent, a reader asks for an article about what changes in a relationship following consummation of that relationship, saying:

“Also it would be great if you could delve more into the intricacies of relationship game. Particularly how it is different from the point up until consummation and how it changes. Much of what is taught is in the form of process and it would help a lot to understand relationship game in those same terms, which i'm sure is probably mostly the same but in different order or amounts etc. Keep up the great work!”

I think most people have an instinctive understanding that once a woman has submitted to a man in sex, her mood changes to him, either softening or (if she experiences sex regret) sometimes hardening. The biggest shift is in the biggest question about a man being answered for a woman: he shifts from an unknown quantity to a known one, and this is used to recast him along a number of different lines.

In today's article, we'll explore what the shifts women make in their attitudes towards men are after sex, and what those lines are that they recast men along.

Following up my piece yesterday on "The 4 Stages of Every Friends with Benefits Relationship", today I'm going to get into the nuts and bolts of running your casual relationships by giving you 8 friends with benefits rules that are absolutely mandatory you follow... to not have everything go to hell in a hand basket, that is.

Friends with benefits are lots of fun, but these relationships are also loaded with the potential to get messy on the turn of a dime. All it takes is a little bending of the rules, and you can very quickly find yourself:

• With a friend with benefits who's falling in love with you

• Falling in love with your friend with benefits yourself

• Experiencing confusion in your social circle about where you stand

• Enjoying reputation damage or drama or other bad effects from things gone awry

Break the rules, and you're playing with fire without a fire extinguisher handy.

Adhere to them, and, well, let's just say you're handling fire in a responsible, fun, and mostly safe way.

So what are these rules you've got to stick to, anyway?