Opening

Something I like prescribing for newer guys as a very low-pressure but high-impact and really quite easy opener is something I’ve begun referring to as “Indirect Direct”, for lack of a better term.

Your run of the mill, general indirect opening – or, engaging a woman in conversation under pretenses other than that you’re interested in her – is a common choice among men. It feels less scary and less like the man is putting himself on the line.

It’s also far less effective than your run of the mill, general direct opening.

Women respond best to men who state – either explicitly or implicitly – their interest. Men using indirect do not do this. And, while they may not realize that women realize what they’re doing, unless a girl is completely clueless, chances are she probably does. And the man looks less for having masked his interest. He looks scared.

Talking today with an acquaintance of mine, we got to commenting on a couple we both knew and how they’d recently gotten together. The girl is a prim, proper girl who is more concerned with clothes and makeup than anything else, and the guy is a little bit of a rough-and-tumble cat from a poorer part of the world – but he’s pretty cocky and self-assured. My acquaintance was surprised the two of them ended up a pair; I wasn’t. “The bad girl got the bad boy,” I said, and he laughed and said that was a good way of putting it.

Maybe my mind was already working that way because of an article I read earlier today on Slate Magazine, called “Freaks, Geeks, and Economists: A study confirms every suspicion you ever had about high-school dating.” The article discusses a study in which, among other things, the term assertive mating is mentioned. Slate defines assortative mating as the tendency of individuals to select for mates similar to themselves; I did a quick look-up on Wikipedia to confirm. The tendency of individuals to select similar mates is known as positive assortative mating; individuals who select for dissimilar traits are referred to as practicing negative assortative mating.

Yesterday, I got into an elevator where I found a really cute girl with an electric scooter. Most people just park their scooters downstairs, so I found it odd she’d brought hers with her. “You’re bringing it with you!” I commented. She giggled pretty hard.

“Why didn’t you leave your scooter downstairs,” I asked. “Afraid someone will take it?”

She laughed again, but seemed not to understand. One of the problems of living in a foreign country is that sometimes people just don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. I decided to try again. “Your scooter,” I said, pointing to it. “Why are you taking it upstairs?” Again, she just giggled and shook her head.

“Are you scared someone will take it? Steal it?” I pressed, trying to be as simple as possible. She still didn’t understand, and we reached her floor and she said “bye bye” and waved and got off.

I don’t know how useful this is as a technique we can discuss here, inasmuch as I don’t know that it’s something you can be taught so much as something you just pick up or develop. But I figured it was worth writing a little about regardless.

I do a little something I call quick reading. Pretty much every guy I know who’s done his fair share of meeting and dating and getting intimate with women does this, and it’s quite different from what you’ll see less experienced guys doing.

What a quick read is is when you very rapidly assess whether a girl is the kind of girl you’d go for.

It’s an extremely useful technique – or maybe habit – that helps a man in two ways:

• Helps him to save time by quickly moving on from women he doesn’t like
• Helps him to end up with women he does like

After a long break from facial hair, I decided last fall to begin sporting some again. I hadn’t had any since I’d shaved off my moustache and goatee back in 2004. This time though, at the end of 2009, I grew a chinstrap and a soul patch. And I noticed an immediate changed in the level of attraction I got from women.

Asian girls from Asia, I noticed, apparently had preferred me clean-shaven, and their attraction for me went down a bit once I began sporting facial hair. But white girls, on the other hand – whoa. Dramatic increase in attraction there. My approach toward them hadn’t changed. My style hadn’t changed. My voice hadn’t changed. But the level of attraction I got from them after growing a little facial hair – that changed over night.

Back when I first got into learning to get better with girls, one of the things I recall really struggling with was communicating to women I was interested in them.

As I watch most newer guys, they seem to consistently have as much difficulty with this concept as I used to. There’s one of two ways it usually goes with guys who struggle with this:

Had a discussion with a friend of mine the other day where he asked me if I ever got the scenario of walking up to a girl, engaging her, and having her blankly stare at me and not respond. He asked because he wondered what it meant – in other words, what he might be doing wrong.

And it touched on something I’d been thinking about recently: on how perceptions of “rejection” change as your understanding of women evolves.

Five years ago, I took any form of non-engagement by a girl I’d started speaking to as a deep, personal rejection. It was as though she had assessed my person and found me unworthy. I felt hurt and insulted.

Nowadays, I recognize that reaction I used to have for what it was: a combination of a lack of understanding of women, and a lack of any kind of abundance mentality. Because the world is not so simple as I assumed it was back then.