Granting Social Status; and, Not Getting Thrown Under the Bus

Neo-

Women are attracted to pride/confidence/arrogance - that's part of it. A guy who's an arrogant asshole and a guy who's an arrogant charmer are a lot closer to each other than either of them is to a guy who's an unconfident anything.

The kinds of girls that "jerks" go for is another one - I never see guys who are legitimate jerks with really beautiful / awesome / high confidence women… they always pull lower self-esteem women - some of these girls do their hair up nice and put on makeup and sexy dresses and get called "hot," but they're typically middle of the road girls playing dress up rather than legitimately gorgeous women. Occasionally you will see an "asshole" with a genuinely beautiful women, but she always has deep personality flaws / problems and self-esteem issues.

Also keep in mind the exaggeration effect - it's pretty common for a guy to say, "I put that bitch in her PLACE!" when what actually happened was he was being mostly normal and telling jokes the whole time, not acting like some tough guy hardass who strong-armed her into the bedroom. A lot of men consider the sexual conquest to be an act of domination, as if the woman didn't really want it herself (but she did). And a lot of men like bragging to their friends about how badass and cool they are.

Chase

Zac-

You're right, it's better to skip "us vs. them" in group scenarios, with the exception being when you're getting read to pull the girl home and you'll have only limited further interaction with the group (Peter talked about this in "How to Escalate with Girls in Social Circle", actually). It's weird if you set an "us vs. them" frame, and then quit talking to her to go talk to them.

Best to save this one for when you're pretty certain you'll bring her home with you and you're not going to be splitting off from her to go socialize with other people, unless you want to risk having her think you didn't really mean it.

Chase

Anon-

When I started working on improving at writing, I was 18 years old, and it took me about a year of writing fiction inconsistently to get to a place where my writing was reasonably solid and the teachers I had in college thought I was good. I wrote mostly song lyrics from 19 to 23 or so, so not much writing practice, although I was still dealing with words a good bit, and I kept a daily journal and a dream journal at the time. When I got into learning girl stuff, I started writing tons in online forums - probably around 2,500 to 3,000 posts on forums from 23 to 27, the majority of the lengthy. I was pretty good then - rated as the #7 all-time poster on mASF based on up votes, only behind guys like Mystery, Style, and TD, who had their own books / TV shows / million-dollar companies.

I did a rewrite of a novel I wrote when I was 18 to 19, and was surprised at how much I'd improved as a writer in the 8 years since. I also started working more on this site, and if you read some of the older articles you can probably pick up that my style before was less polished than it is now. Many of the articles from 2011 on though I think are all reasonably solid. I've added a lot of pieces to my article writing since then, but I feel like my writing from 2011 is still close to being on-par with where I am now.

So, I'd say it maybe took me about 10 years of writing stuff at first intermittently, then later almost every day to get to a place where I feel relatively confident saying I've achieved a level of mastery with writing. Doesn't mean I'm done learning though… I'm still adding pieces to my writing game everywhere I can find new pieces. I think Stephen King's advice here is good: set a minimum of 2,000 words a day. If you can do more than that, great; but 2,000 words minimum is a good benchmark to aim for at least.

This being a successful business: well, it depends on what you mean by "success" - you'll find that's a target that moves quite a bit early on in a business's lifecycle. I launched GC in 2008, but didn't start working on it with any real commitment or regularity until the end of 2010. A year later it was earning enough income-wise to pay its bills and mine.

On launching a blog as a business: I suppose it depends on your money-making goals, but I'd recommend against it, at least as your core thing. For marketing purposes, it's all right, but quite time-consuming; there are lots and LOTS of blogs out there that don't have anywhere near the traffic Girls Chase gets, though. Everybody and his brother has a blog. And blogs are hard to monetize. Before the subscription model, this site made a penny per visitor. Now it's somewhere around a penny-and-a-half or two pennies a visitor.

To make a blog work, you need a unique angle, you need something to share that other people REALLY want to read about, and you need to be able to market it. I spent 7 years on forums before I really started seriously building the blog here. My first 3 or 4 years on forums I only ever wrote field reports and replies because I didn't think I had anything original enough to say to warrant making a standalone post about it. Lots of other people made lots of posts on, "Here's how to do THIS thing!" that really didn't share anything new at all… most forum posts and most blogs for that matter are just people repeating each other.

I'd recommend learning programming if you REALLY want to make serious money online. Had I done programming instead of writing when figuring out what kind of business I want to launch, I'm pretty sure I'd have some much larger businesses now than this one.

However, if all you want is a lifestyle business that provides a few thousand dollars a month, that's doable with a blog, IF you have something to say that other people really want to read.

Even in the dating advice niche though, the Internet is littered with the corpses of failed pickup blogs. I have guys with new blog sites emailing GC every day trying to get us to market their products for them or send our readers to their sites. Most people think all they have to do is write a few articles and then ask other people to just give them money or traffic… it's a bit more complicated than that.

No matter what you do, it's going to be hard; I'd probably recommend doing something with higher upside (learning PHP or Rails, and then joining a startup to see what the startup process is like, then starting your own business - you can then use blogging as a marketing tool for your web app or whatever you build) than just pure blogging - but if you really want to try it, you have a good angle, and you have something that people really want and need to read about that they can't find anywhere else - go for it.

Chase

Michal-

This is how sociable women interact with people. They say things like, "I want to SEE you!" and, "Text me - we HAVE to hang out!" but it's usually a gesture out of politeness / niceness more than it is an actual desire to meet up with you.

If she really wants to meet up with you, she'll stop and nail down a time.

If you don't want to worry about this stuff, the best thing you can do (and what I always do with girls who say this) is go, "Yeah, TOTALLY! Here, let me give you my number - text me when you want to meet up."

Then I forget about them.

Usually you don't hear from them, but occasionally you do. Just let them do most of the work on planning and scheduling, and help them out when they need helping out, and if it works out, great, if not, well, you didn't really expect it to anyway because she was behaving more like a polite sociable girl than a girl who's romantically or sexually interested in you.

Chase

Nathan-

That's understandable. Pretty much everybody goes through some measure of that as he improves himself - I was pretty hesitant about using direct openers, for instance, for a long time because I didn't want to risk putting myself out there too much and getting smacked down. Playful or situational just felt a lot "safer" to use.

The best thing you can do to reset your understanding of your value is start DOING stuff that you can only get away with when you're a higher social value guy, and monitoring the results. When I started pushing myself to open direct, I kept expecting girls to snub me, but instead they'd get REALLY excited and heavily flirtatious, and I'd have some really great outcomes and end up with pretty girls in my bed a lot faster than usual. At first it was like, "Whoa... it's working! I can't believe it!"

But then your brain gets used to it and starts saying, "Of COURSE it's working. I AM me, after all ;)"

And you have effectively reset your understanding of what your social value is. You've achieved a new mental baseline.

If you're not showing enough interest in a girl relative to your social value (the higher your value, the more interest you need to show, albeit in a smooth, charming, natural way - not slobbering all over her, of course), you start getting into auto-rejection territory more and more frequently, where women will reject you to avoid what they feel is an impending rejection by YOU - e.g., she thinks you aren't all that into her, so feels insulted and goes cold on you and starts treating you like dirt.

The best way to build a new baseline of social value is seeing improved results firsthand - try out things like using direct openers, and pushing to move interactions forward as fast as you can, and pay attention to your results. Things will probably work out better than you (emotionally) expect them to, and that will change how you view your social value pretty darn quick.

Chase

Anon-

I have a (somewhat lengthy) thread on my thoughts about properly transitioning into marriage on the discussion boards here: Marriage: Not a Big Deal (to You) - I expect that will answer your questions on the lead-up to it.

Chase

Balla-

Well, props on getting girls excited enough that they're now kiss-raping you ;)

Kissing is a very intimate act well along the road to sex. Girls get very sexually aroused during kissing, and their bodies prepare for intercourse. When intercourse does not occur, the feeling they get is, "Oh. He was kissing me, and wanted to have sex with me [she assumes you felt the same as she did or even more so since you were into it / chasing after more while she pulled away]. But we didn't have sex. That must be because I wrote him off and we are not sexually compatible."

The one exception is where you break off the kissing first and tell her, "That's all you're getting for now," or, "We need to save SOMETHING for later!" When you end the kissing first and she feels as though SHE is the one chasing and not in control, you can avoid having her go completely cold after kissing without sex much of the time.

Tariq Nasheed I don't know, but the name sounds familiar. And, acting smooth and calm being creepy? I'd suspect that the real culprit here was it was a guy who was already creepy TRYING to act smooth and calm. A man can be smooth and calm and charming, and a man can be rough around the edges and nervous and charming too.

But the guys I see get called "creepy" the most by women are usually the ones who are the most nervous and awkward around women, not the ones who are the smoothest, calmest, and most comfortable around women.

In fact, almost every girl I can think of whom I've had start telling me, "You are SO CALM," I've ended up in bed with sometime within the next hour or two of her saying this. When chaos is flying around everywhere and you remain cool and composed, women get very turned on.

Chase

Anon-

Depends on how well the socially savvy guy knows the girl.

If he's just met her and she isn't sold on him yet, him saying this can cause her to rebel, and say something like, "You know what, it's fine, you two talk, I'm going to go find my friends. It was great meeting you!" then leave. I had it happen to me enough that I stopped addressing people interrupting me in the "more considerate" tone when I'd only just met the girl and they tried bursting in. When she's only just met you, and you tell someone else who wants to talk to you that you would prefer to talk to her, you tell her right off the bat that you're chasing after her, usually without her having given you a reason to chase her yet (you know nothing about her and she's said or done nothing especially impressive or unique yet). This drives women away like clockwork unless they start off the interaction already entranced with you.

Conversely, if you already know her pretty well from before, OR you've been talking to her for a while and have already gotten some commitment from her (e.g., you've moved her once already), it's safe to declare that you're in a conversation and tell the guy you'll catch up with him later.

Chase

V-

That's no fun. I haven't dealt with this in women, but I've dealt with it in several other areas where I've been a novice - business was one I was particularly afflicted with it... lots of bad advice from other people when I'd have been fine had I just followed my gut.

My general strategy is this: don't tell people about important things to you until after the matter's already concluded. So, if you have a hot date, for instance, don't tell anyone about it until you've slept with the girl, or TOTALLY written her off. Otherwise, keep your mouth shut on her until it's decided. The one exception is if you know someone really knows his stuff... then ask. Otherwise, keep it to yourself.

Everybody has an opinion, and usually, the less real life experience a person has with a thing, the more strongly he will want to impose his opinions on you. They even did a study on doctors that found that the doctors with the most confidently-given instructions to patients were both a.) the most likely to be listened to and followed by the patients, and b.) the most likely to be WRONG in their advice. It's called the "overconfidence effect."

I see the same thing when someone presents a dating or relationship problem to a group of people I'm in; I'll say, "Just do this and you'll be fine," and then some guy who's slept with a handful of girls and knows jack-all about women will jump in and say, "No way, that will NEVER work! You've got to do X, Y, and Z if you want to have ANY hope of success!" and the other guy will go, "Really?" and I'll go, "No, not really - this guy has zero experience, he doesn't know what he's talking about." And the other guy will go, "You don't NEED a lot of experience to know the right thing to do in this situation - and it's X, Y, and Z!!" So the first guy will go with that guy's advice, then fail miserably and come back crying about it. The outspoken guy will go, "Okay, so what you PROBABLY need to do differently is [random horse manure]." Then I get annoyed at the levels of inanity and ineffectiveness and don't bother with that group of people anymore.

If someone knows what he's talking about, the advice-giving is always trademark the same: he will say, "Look man, just do this," and if he gets pushback, he'll just say, "Okay, yeah, sure, do whatever you want." The guy who DOESN'T know what he's talking about though will hang on like a pitbull and INSIST that you do it his way. That's how you separate out the guys who are just giving you some solid advice but otherwise could care less if you take it from the guys who are giving advice more to validate their own egos than they are because they've genuinely got the answers you need.

On setting proper expectations for one-night stands, see these articles:

• Don't Hurt a Girl: The Importance of Expectations
• How to Date Multiple Women (with Zero Drama)
• The 9 Secrets to Being a Sexual Man
  

Chase

Bolt-

Nope, can't treat them that way - past maybe 2,000 people or so, a group gets too unwieldy to function as a cohesive whole. At that point, it's more a collection of loose affiliations than one large group.

Once you're past 10,000 or 15,000 people in a university, you're at the point where it's effectively more or less anonymous and you can approach as much as you like, with social circles within the university that you'll be a part of and will roll with, and various people you know whom you'll run into randomly here and there. You're best served using a mix of cold approach and social circle, depending on the situation.

Also worth noting: first year students start off in a big hodgepodge of strangers acting wild and crazy, since no one knows anybody else and it feels like there are no social consequences (everyone's a stranger). By the time you make it to senior year though, everyone's mellowed out a good bit, stopped hooking up quite as much, and settled into his or her own circles of friends.

Chase

Benassi-

It's never frustrated me so much as worried me - I've always feared ending up trapped in the same life everyone else leads, which looked horribly devoid of much meaning or originality to me.

I think society on the whole is a very good thing. Without the vast majority of people playing the roles that society lines up for them to play, we wouldn't have these massively built up civilizations with all the luxuries that we have… there'd be no traveling overseas on an airplane, meeting liberated women with their own careers free to sleep with sexy men they meet without fearing or suffering social repercussions, or anything similar. No computers, Internet, or other infrastructure of the sort, either. And on the other side, too - without society to tell people what to do, it'd be chaos. Most people are never going to be able to figure out their own path through life.

Someone like you or I traveling the world, sleeping with different girls, and figuring out the money thing without a 9-to-5 is still largely following social convention too - we still earn money rather than steal it or sponge off of other people or barter, still speak the same language, still have largely the same value/behavior systems (don't hurt other people, shower regularly, brush your teeth, wear nice clothes, nod your head for 'yes,' shake your head for 'no,' hold the door for little old ladies)… most of the time you see people railing against society, if you stop and pay attention you'll notice they're living in society, using all the things society built, and are 99% in agreement with everything their society has taught them, with just a few minor disagreements here or there (e.g., you want an apartment instead of a house).

There are very few people who exist truly outside society - one of those children raised by dogs would be a good example (there are a few in Eastern Europe if you do an Internet search for them).

The thing I think is getting to you is that most people blindly accept that they "should" do things that are SUPPOSED to be to their benefit, but in fact often lead them off a cliff. I see a lot of this with Western women right now, who doggedly pursue careers and money because society tells them that's what women SHOULD do, while female happiness levels have done nothing but fall dramatically as women have done this over the past 30 or 40 years (men's happiness levels have stayed pretty much the same). I've read things recently about women saying they felt embarrassed to be home raising children instead of furthering their careers; there's so much social pressure on women right now to become career winners that they're sacrificing happiness and meaning in their lives in pursuit of this phantom objective that they only want because they've been told it's the road to social success. And there are similar messages going toward Western men, although I think Western women right now get the shorter end of the stick (and it's mostly other women who are telling them what to want, ironically).

It seems to me the best way to approach any social convention is neither blind acceptance nor blind rebellion, but rather careful reflection: if this social institution is so pervasive, it probably came about for a good reason. What was the original reason, how did it get so big and important, and does it still serve that role in society?

Once you understand the original and current merits of a thing, you're free to decide in a much more conscious way if you want that thing for yourself… or not.

Chase

Wolf-

If texting isn't working for you, I'd recommend you start working on your phone game. Text works best when you make a strong initial impression and the girl is at least a little excited to meet up with you again. If you're still working on getting the right kind of impression and anticipation down, you can make up for some of this with decent phone conversation skills.

I'd recommend checking out these articles for more on this:

• Tactics Tuesdays: Making the First Phone Call to a Girl
• Call Girls to Success: Phone Secrets Part II

Chase

Wolf-

How closely are you following the texting guides on the site here? Wording is important - there are light, casual, cool ways to word texts, and plenty of other ways to word them that sound less cool. See "How to Text Girls: 20 More Tips and Techniques."

Taking a few hours to reply to texts is fine most of the time, although it can make you seem a bit less interested. If a girl is VERY interested in you, it can be better to fire off a few texts in a short period of time (and then, if you need to, go pull the vanishing act for a few hours, and then finish up setting the logistics for your meet up later).

Chase