Tactics Tuesdays

Use the 3-minute rule before you approach a girl. If someone will disrupt you or pull her away in the first 3 minutes of conversation, don't approach her (yet).

A little while back, we covered the 3-second rule. The 3-second rule is a tactic you can use to get yourself to approach women before you lose your nerve. It's a useful rule. You won't always use it, but if you struggle with approach anxiety, it should be your default.

Today we'll talk about a different tactic called the 3-Minute Rule. Although it sounds the same, this is a different rule with a different purpose. The 3-second rule's purpose is to get you to approach. The 3-minute rule is to focus your approaches and get you to avoid time-wasters... so you can zero in on worthwhile women.

As you use this rule more, you'll find your approaches succeed more. Early pickup wildcards will bother you less. And meeting women will grow more relaxed and easier.

If you can future project, you can lead a woman to imagine you as a part of her future. This is no mythical trick -- it only takes words to do.

One of your prime objectives with a new woman is to have her think of you in a different way from how she thinks of other men. Most men to her are nameless, faceless strangers. Even if they're attractive, if she feels no connection to them, they'll struggle with her.

Yet once a woman feels a connection with you, and envisions the possibilities with you, it changes. She won't dismiss you out of hand. She'll consider what you say to her. She opens up to your suggestions.

One tactic to 'fast track' women envisioning themselves with you is future projection. To project something is to push it out and paint a picture of it. When you future project, you paint a picture of the future.

Paint a good-enough picture, and a gal can start to feel like the two of you are already close to something like boyfriend and girlfriend... even if you've only just met.

Busyness can be very attractive to women. But to make it so, you need two things: flirtation and instruction.

Women like busy men. They find them attractive. This is because women like capable men, and busyness implies capability. If you're busy, you must have it going on.

You can't fake busy. Or if you try to, it won't come off well. There's too much nuance to being truly busy to effectively fake it.

However, if you actually are busy, there's a right and a wrong way to use your busyness with women. Use it the wrong way, and women will assume you aren't interested. Use it right, and you can up your attractiveness while making women invest more in you (and commit to the courtship).

If you run into resistance with a girl, instead of plow through, step away a moment... to let her fix her resistance herself.

Usually when you meet a girl, you don't want to leave her. If you leave her, she might leave herself! Some other guy might dash in to steal her away. Her emotions toward you may cool. There's no telling what could happen.

So, you will tend to be with her straight through. Straight to the point you take her contact info, then say farewell. Or straight to the point you invite her home (then take her there).

Once she's home with you, you'll be at her side the whole time too. You want her to get comfortable with you, after all. She can't get comfortable with you when you're not there.

Thus, this tactic might seem a smidge counterintuitive.

Yet if you want to solidify her commitment to you, and get her to value you more, this one'll do that.

And all you have to do to use it is (at the proper moment) leave her alone for two (2) minutes.

Girl won't come out, or isn't sure about you… or you're too busy to meet her 1-on-1? Extend a group invite date to her, and get her doing something social with you.

My normal advice with you for dates is 'get her out alone with you'.

Don't make dates less intimate. Don't do party dates. Don't do things where there are other people around to distract.

In the typical scenario, where you have a girl who's already game to come out with you 1-on-1, this is the best advice for you. There's no need to overcomplicate things for yourself or introduce chaos by involving additional people. Make the date about you and her, and get everything else out of the way.

However... there are a few scenarios in which 'get her out 1-on-1' isn't practical or viable. And sometimes it just makes more sense to do something in a group.

For such cases, it can actually make sense to skip the 1-on-1, and invite a girl to a group event.

Because just like 1-on-1 dates, group invite dates have their upsides, too.

Don’t get stuck in boring go-nowhere conversations with girls. Ditch the small talk, and flirt with ‘small talk zero’ instead.

This is for any guy who runs into this issue:

You're in a situation, start to talk to a girl, make small talk about the setting/situation, then get trapped in a platonic conversation where you talk about boring situational things that neither you nor the girl care about. She loses interest and slips away.

If this happens to you, there's an easy tactic you can use, and that is to go 'small talk zero'. Instead of make small talk, your entire early conversation consists of flirtatious banter.

Sometimes you can make small talk work perfectly fine, especially if you are confident in how you do it and don't spend too long on it. However, if you're nervous, or don't feel in control of the situation, it's easy to fall into a small talk loop, where small talk leads to more small talk, which leads to boredom, and women leaving.

Since we don't want attractive women leaving, instead of getting trapped in an endless small talk loop, we can use 'zero small talk' flirtation instead.

Every group or society has norms it expects members to follow. These norms extend to dating and romance as well. But what if you aren't from the same norm group?

I've done quite a bit of travel and lived in a variety of places, all very different from each other, with people who were all quite different too. Everywhere I have gone, I have encountered many men who told me the women in whatever city or country I was in were 'traditional' and 'hard to get anywhere with'. Often I would have men telling me this after I had already quickly slept with several normal, local women, with normal dating histories (not wild party girls, sluts, or 'exceptions to the rule'). I never want to rub it in a guy's face, so usually I will just say "Well, the girls here seem pretty normal and not too uptight to me."

I am not the only guy this happens to. Everywhere I've lived or traveled for any good amount of time, for every 10 guys I meet who tell me the women there are 'difficult' or 'traditional', I'll meet at least one man who tells me the women there are unbelievably easy. Often these guys sleep with multiple new women a week, oblivious to the guys who spend months or years without girlfriends or lays.

I could spend 10 posts unpacking the differences between the 'girls here are hard to get' guys and the 'girls here are so easy' guys... and in many ways, this website is devoted to just this mission.

Today though, I want to talk about one specific wrinkle of the successful guys' success: playing dumb on dating norms.