Pickup

A few posts back we discussed how girls show interest. That post, though, was primarily focused on how you can tell a woman’s interested in you once you’re already talking to her. Let’s rewind it backward in the interaction a bit.

I’ve been having a lot of one-shot successes lately, where I only talk to one girl and the girl and I then get together later. The primary reason for this is that my situational awareness has gotten high enough that I’ve gotten rather skilled at being able to pick up on what girl wants to get to know me, then capitalizing on it.

Just walked out the second girl I slept with in a 12-hour period. Oh my, going to need to get a good night’s sleep tonight… and I’m all out of bed sheets.

So I slept with a new girl yesterday who continues this streak I’ve been on of young and inexperienced girls. She’s the second new girl in less than a week to tell me I’m only her second lover, in fact. This is a girl I’d met a few months earlier at a dinner related to some work I was doing at the time. We’d spoken a few times since, and yesterday we had our first date. She spent the night with me, and this morning told me she loved me.

She asked me if I loved her back; I looked at her and gave her a warm smile. “You don’t love me,” she said.

“You don’t love me either,” I told her. “We just got together yesterday!”

“But I loved you the moment I saw you,” she said. “I walked into the restaurant and I saw you, and you smiled at me, and I said, ‘Oh God, I’m in love.’ Didn’t you feel it? Why did you smile at me that way?”

Women are subtle in how they show interest. Well, by male standards, anyway. Even when women think they are blatantly obvious, they’re quite often being very subtle by male standards.

Learning to tell how girls show interest is a very valuable skill for a man, because it will allow him to operate with greater assurance he’s making the right move at the right time, and will also allow him to pick up the pace when a woman signals she is ready.

The last couple of girls I slept with surprised me a little at how quickly they were ready to get together. They gave me some hints that probably would’ve seemed fairly subtle; a friend of mine remarked that one of the girls I took home and bedded rather quickly quite recently hadn’t even seemed to be terribly interested in me, and that it just looked like we were having a good conversation. Being able to read the signals they gave me was the main reason I moved as quickly with them as I did.

Probably by now you have your New Year’s resolutions all done up and set to go for 2011, and you’re charged up and (hopefully) already setting to work turning those resolutions into reality.

I’ve always been a little anti-New Year’s resolutions myself, but that mostly because I’m just kind of a humbug, contrarian kind of cat. When I stop and think about it, I often do set a number of goals at the very beginning of the year, which for all intents in purposes are, in fact, resolutions for the new year. So, I grudgingly accept that now I, despite my protestations otherwise, do in fact make New Year’s resolutions. And they do, in fact, help.

So if you’re a little on the lazy side, or a bit of a humbug like me, and you don’t usually do resolutions for the next year, I invite you to do things a little different this year and join me in setting a few goals for yourself in 2011.

There’s this thing called approach anxiety, and I haven’t talked about it all that much, because it was never a huge concern for me personally, and it was always something I was able to push through okay on my own. Sure, sometimes I’d stiffen up and miss out on a girl I should’ve had, but all in all it was never too bad for me. I had a lot of fears as a kid, and got into the habit early of overcoming them by confronting them head on; this might be why I was never overly concerned with this one. I just tackled it the same as the rest of them.

But for some guys, approach anxiety is crippling. I’ve coached men who would at times simply refuse to approach women; I eventually got pretty good at getting guys to approach, even when they were terrified to (the first few approaches are always the toughest), but how does a guy who’s shaken about going up to meet women do that on his own, without a coach there to work him through it?

The chief tenet of the Law of Least Effort in seduction is that the less effort you put in while still achieving the desired result, the more powerful, attractive, and sexy you appear. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is by learning to communicate without the use of words.

If you’ve ever studied very charismatic people – I have, and I recommend it – something you’ll notice is that they frequently say things with fun, charming, wordless expressions. A smile and a wink, say, or a mischievous look. For instance, maybe someone asks a charismatic man if he can handle a certain situation – he gives them the skeptical look with just a hint of a knowing smile and then gets to it. Or maybe he gives a small smile, makes a thumbs up sign, and goes about his business.

I was sitting in a nightclub tonight, smoke and booze surrounding me, sipping on a Jack and Coke (or what passes for one in this country), and thinking about some past interactions and feeling vaguely annoyed. There was the girl on Saturday whose friend was pushing her to go home with me as hard as she could, but the girl was a little too shy and wanted to push that back. I didn’t push as hard as I could; I still have a decent chance with her – she’s set to come cook dinner for me later this week – but my chances would’ve been better had I pushed a bit harder and taken her home that night. She liked me enough, but rather than close it out when I had it I let it slip through my fingers. Then there was the girl I brought home Friday night but who stayed tense and I didn’t push anything with since I couldn’t get her comfortable. She wants to see me again too, but my chances in the future are far lower than they were that night she was sitting in my apartment.