Pickup

Have had an exhausting past few days, just constantly tired and running all over the place, but wanted to get some thoughts up here, so this’ll be just a short quick post.

There’s a saying that goes, “If you want to learn, teach,” and one of the cool things about teaching something as dynamic as seduction is that it compels you to continually be refining things, questioning things, and identifying new strategies and techniques and then asking yourself why they work.

I intended for this to be a shorter post, since I’ve put up a few long ones in a row and I didn’t get much sleep last night as I’m still rocking a jet lag (so much for my claims to not be affected by that… it’s good though, I’m waking up early in the morning and cranking on stuff I want to work on, so my jet lag has actually made me more productive). We’ll see if I’m able to write something concise this time, just to shake things up a bit and throw everyone a curve ball. A short article from Chase? Bet you weren’t expecting that!

Well, so, I touched on reactions a bit in “Learning from Reactions: Developing Social Calibration” two months ago (to the day, actually… how about that?), where I mostly stressed how you can use reactions to learn social calibration, but also mentioned that you don’t want to make reactions too much a focus of yours. This post is going to work on explaining why that is.

This is kind of a simple topic, but it’s one almost no one ever thinks about. It’s one of those things you point out to a guy and you watch his face light up like he’s just had a small epiphany. That’s something of a favorite pastime of mine: looking for those ideas that feel simple and intuitive but that no one ever stops and considers... then making people stop and consider them.

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?