Socializing

I met a really very cute and pretty 20 year old college student waiting in line for the bus today. We started talking and grabbed seats together – actually, we almost missed the bus, too engrossed in talking to each other as we were, until we suddenly realized everyone else had walked past us and boarded already!

Our conversation flowed smoothly, but I could tell she had just the slightest hint of reservation, though I did not know why. I was being quite calm and nice with her, and was relatively certain I wasn’t coming across too strongly, and I did my best to stay away from any overly high-value topics, aside from speaking a little French with her and discussing my impression of France while traveling there a few years back when she mentioned learning French and wanting to visit Paris. Even that might have been a little too much, but overall I estimated the benefit of having these additional things to bond on outweighed the danger of showing too much value.

It wasn’t until near the end of the bus ride, fifteen or twenty minutes after we had already exchanged contact information and tentatively discussed meeting this weekend, that she finally came out with what it was that was keeping her reserved. I was able to get to it by asking her some deeper emotional questions – she discussed not loving what she studied in college, so I asked her what she loved. She then told me that her boyfriend had been disappearing together with his ex-girlfriend and not taking her phone calls.

Know how when you walk into McDonald’s or any other fast food restaurant or just about anywhere with service personnel they ask you if they can help you? They are, after all, at your service; it’s their job to be so.

Now, if you had to reckon, what do you think the likelihood is that a woman becomes very sexually attracted to a man asking her how he can help her, then catering to her every need? Chances are, not terribly likely, right?

Paying attention to others and measuring and analyzing how they react to you is a dangerous game. It can lead to all sorts of bad things – “analysis paralysis”, too much of a focus on reactions and too little of one on results, and attention-seeking and reaction-grabbing behavior to the extreme.

And yet, monitoring and learning from reactions is an utterly vital habit to get into. Without reaction analysis, most folks are doomed to low levels of social calibration for life.

There’s a dreadful mistake that many men new to seduction make, and that is the mistake of trying to make women monkeywrench themselves into the man’s conversation, or apartment, or bed. For obvious reasons, the more difficult it is for a woman to get together with a man, the less likely it is to happen. And many men make things quite difficult.

This seems to be due mostly to inexperience and uncertainty on how to proceed. Certainly, if a man hasn’t been with many women, and hasn’t had many experiences of guiding a woman down the path toward the two of them becoming intimate together, there’s going to be much that’s foggy, hazy, and downright confusing for him.

And when things are foggy, hazy, and downright confusing, people tend to fumble around, show their inexperience, and be tentative and look for support.

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.

I’ve just begun some very preliminary outlining for what I intend to be an audio CD product I’ll be releasing hopefully early 2011, to follow on the heels of How to Make Girls Chase, which ought to be coming out sometime in December if everything continues according to plan. The audio project is tentatively titled “Spellbinding”, and it’ll focus on how to connect rapidly with women and get out of something I call treading water – getting stuck in that maddening no-man’s land where you just can’t find anything interesting that you have in common with a girl to talk about, and you can feel her slipping away by the minute. If there’s one thing that drove me crazy for years, it was probably that.

Spellbinding was originally set to be my second audio product; I was going to focus first on one on targeting and figuring out which girls are likely to be most receptive to you. But after talking working with the topic of connecting and getting out of “treading water” with a good guy recently, I started feeling like this is probably an area that a lot of guys could benefit from some help on, so I’m pushing the schedule on Spellbinding up.

The same cool cat I spoke with about this topic sent me a follow up email with the following question:

A few posts ago, we took a look at dealing with disruptive men – ways to shut down and deal with men who come in and interrupt your interaction with a woman. This post is a little different than that one – this is about how you deal with being interrupted by someone who has something she wants to add to your conversation.