How to Break the Ice: 5 Surefire Ways to Entice Her

When I was in college, a bunch of my floor mates wanted to know how to break the ice, and as a result started bandying around a new line to use with women. It went like this:

Guy: Hey, do you know how much a polar bear weighs?

Girl: No... how much?

Guy: Enough to break the ice! Hi, I'm Hal.

It's cute, but fortunately for you, there are many more ways you can use to break the ice with women that are a lot less cheesy than this.

Ice-breaking is a "line" than it is a technique, done properly. And there's more to ice-breaking than simply starting a new conversation.

In the article "How to Be Playful: 4 Tips You'll NEED," on the function of playfulness, I noted:

“Socially talented men employ playfulness for exactly TWO reasons:

1. Breaking the ice, and
2. Reducing tension
   

... that's it. Playfulness only serves those two functions. They're two sides of the same coin, really - the "ice" that you break is really just the tension that comes before initiating a conversation where no one really knows what to say yet to do that.”

And what I'm going to talk about in this article is exactly that - reducing tension, and breaking the ice. Although there are some differences between the two, there's a lot of overlap as well... so we'll cover both in this post.

Think of the scenarios in which you feel tension:

• Standing next to a pretty girl you'd like to meet
• Staring into the eyes of a muscled man twice your size
• Hearing a police officer or security guard call out after you to stop
• Sitting in class as a teacher hands back that test you were unsure about
• Sitting in a meeting at work preparing to give a presentation you're unsure about
• Walking into an interview for a job you really want

Those are some pretty tense situations, right?

How about some situations where you probably don't feel tense at all?

• Have a casual talk with your parents or siblings
• Hanging out drinking beers or cocktails with your friends
• Relaxing with a girl you've been dating for 6 months or a year
• Sitting in a classroom with no teacher, just talking with classmates
• Sitting in your cubicle at work with nothing to do, chatting with workmates

Stark, night-and-day difference in the emotions you feel between these two broad categories, isn't there?

Now, the emotions you feel within each of these broad categories aren't entirely the same - the tension you feel in a stare-down with a man twice your size is going to be closer to fear of harm, while the tension you feel walking into an interview or standing next to a pretty girl is going to be closer to fear of failure or of losing face.

Alternately, the relaxed feeling you have at work is different from the one you have around family, which is different from the one with your girlfriend.

But on a broad level, there's quite a gulf between the two categories.

Where does that tension come from when it's there, and how does it affect you so powerfully?

Attachment and Uncertainty, Twin Fuels for Tension

Whenever I find myself in a place in life where I'm going through a great deal of stress, I like to reassure myself by reminding myself internally, "This is only going to increase your resistance to stress and pressure, and better your ability to deal with uncertainty, and better able to not remain so attached to these high-pressure outcomes and situations."

Uncertainty and attachment are the lynch pins for tension. They are what causes it, what grows it, what fuel its burning like a conflagration that rages increasingly out of control.

And becoming well-able to seduce women requires you to be able to bridge the gap between not having enough tension to hold her interest, and having so much tension that she cannot handle it and removes herself from your presence.

In "Sexual Tension: 7 Ways to Make Women Excited and Randy," we discussed creating tension quite in-depth; so I won't go into that again here. But do keep in mind as you read this, the goal is NEVER to go to zero tension; it is, rather simply to reduce tension to manageable levels, and manipulate that tension into the right kind of tension.

Before we get to talking about that though, I want to talk about this: how uncertainty and attachment fuel tension, and why there exists a need for you to even learn how to break the ice and reduce that tension in the first place.

We live in a competitive environment where most of the dangers and most of the treasure troves around us come from other people, and because of this, people generate most of our threats and opportunities (although, to be fair, we feel tension around things in the natural world, too; a grizzly bear staring at you from 10 feet away, and a gleaming diamond the size of a grapefruit that's just out of your reach in a ravine are both going to inspire scads of tension rising up in your breast, too).

Because of this need for assessing threats and opportunities, our minds run on alert, priming us to each of these with feelings of tension.

A hundred years ago, "tension" was frequently referred to by the word "anticipation," which is a word I particularly enjoy using for this sort of thing. These days, most writers and speakers use "anticipation" to mean something somewhat different than its original intended use; today it normally connotes a kind of neutral waiting for something, whereas before it used to mean waiting for something with baited breath... waiting for the hammer to drop, or the sack to fall.

You feel this anticipation when your mind has cooked up various potential future outcomes of a certain degree of importance to you, and you don't know which one will happen.

These three components are key:

1. Your mind is predicting possible outcomes

2. It is of significance to you which of those outcomes actually occurs

3. You don't know with any certainty which of those outcomes will occur

Remove any one of those elements, and tension and anticipation vanishes.

This is of great significance to what we'll discuss in a moment - how to break the ice and how to reduce tension - but for now, I just want to highlight how tension works.

Because once you know how a thing works, you know how to use that thing, and direct it and steer it.

There you are, standing in line behind a beautiful woman at a convenience store near your house. You're wishing you could talk to her, and while you wait, trying to think what to say, trying to push yourself to just open your mouth and say it, the tension inside of you just builds... and builds... and builds...

Now, you're sitting in a smoky lounge with some girl you've only recently met, but you already like a lot. And you're pretty sure she likes you, too... and now it feels like you should DO... well, something. But you're not sure exactly what; or maybe you THINK you know what, but it just seems so... hard to do. So you sit there staring at her, and she sits there staring at you, and the two of you keep trying to talk, but it's getting more and more awkward, and more and more tense... more and more heavy... until it starts to feel like one of you is going to explode, and you know if you don't do something soon she's going to walk away...

These are just two examples of circumstances in which tension is spiraling out of your control and you need to reel it back in. You need to reduce it; tamp down the fire. And you need to know how to break the ice to do that.

Reducing the tension and breaking the ice serves a couple of different functions:

• It allows you to calm down and stay in command

• It helps the girl to calm down and not snap under pressure

• It prevents your interaction from peaking early and becoming a spell broken situation where it then ends with the girl and you can't get her back

Being able to break the ice whenever you or the girl you're talking to (or both) start freezing up with tension is very necessary for being able to move things forward smoothly and continuously without skidding off the road (and into a giant tension snow bank). An ability to raise tension, coupled with an ability to CREATE tension (as discussed in the article on sexual tension) enables you to conduct your seductions with the skill of a maestro: confidently, adroitly, and masterfully.

As noted above, you need three components in order for tension to be able to build and grow. Without all three, you won't have tension.

If you're certain of the outcome - whether that's because you can only SEE one possible outcome, or because there are multiple possible outcomes but you KNOW which one it will be - you will not feel tension. Imagine playing a video game you've beaten a hundred times and reaching an easy boss you have to defeat - not very tense, right? Or playing a game of chess or a match of tennis against somebody far less talented than you.

Alternately, if you're unattached to the outcome - you don't particularly care all that much how this one goes - you won't feel tension either. Let's say you've just been entered into a raffle to win three free sticks of celery. You're probably not on the edge of your seat, right? That's because you don't care. Change those three free sticks of celery into three free million-dollar stacks of currency, and I bet your tension goes up a good bit as they call the name of the winner.

What this means for you is, you feel tension when you're uncertain how things will go with a girl, and you care about the outcome - and so does she.

Her reasons for caring might be:

• It's awkward and she doesn't know what a guy wants (e.g., he's a creepy guy)
• She's excited and wants to meet a guy, but doesn't know if he'll be cool or not
• She's talking to a guy she's feeling increasingly attracted to, and doesn’t know if he feels the same way or if anything will happen between them
  

If at any point she becomes CERTAIN of how things will go, she loses tension and interest (thus, the emphasis placed here on building intrigue), or if she stops CARING how things will go (e.g., attraction expires, or she goes into auto-rejection), she loses tension and interest.

All that said, and you now having a good grip on what tension is and where it comes from... how do you break the ice?

The 5 Ways

I've broken ice-breaking down into 3 subcategories of different kinds of tension, and 5 distinct approaches for breaking that ice:

"Stranger" Tension

1. Verbally opening

Conversational Tension

2. Verbal humor / playfulness
3. Verbally stating your interest
   

Sexual Tension

4. Kissing on the mouth
   
5. Sexual intercourse

You will notice as we go through these that the first 3 approaches are verbal, while both of the last 2 approaches are physical. There's a reason for all of these, and we'll go into those when we explain them.

But let's talk about the different types of tension first briefly.

• Stranger Tension is the kind of tension and uncertainty you get around someone who's a stranger, whom you haven't started speaking with yet. That big, angry-looking guy walking right up to you in the bar or that beautiful, sultry woman staring directly at you across the restaurant - that tension you feel is because they're strangers and you feel the threat or the opportunity, care about the outcome, and aren't certain if you will get the outcome you want or not. Women feel this too prior to meeting you if they're interested in you or they can tell you want to talk to them.

• Conversational Tension is the tension you feel in a conversation when either you know you should say something but you're not sure what it is, or the conversation seems to be getting heavier and heavier and it needs some kind of outlet for the pressure. Women are also highly attuned to this, and if you're feeling it, so are they, 90% of the time.

• Sexual Tension is the tension that builds as lust and sexual desire mount. The outlets for sexual tension are physical releases - kissing on the mouth is one, sexual intercourse another.

Note: I'm only teaching you how to break the ice with "satisfactory" approaches. You can also break the ice and reduce tension by other means - say, by telling a girl who's becoming more tense, in a neutral (non-sexual) tone, "Hey, relax, I'm not interested in you. You're not my type," or to a girl who's very turned on, again in a neutral, non-sexual tone, "You want me to have sex with you, don't you?" Essentially, these break the ice, but not in a good way, and significantly reduce the chances you end up with a girl, so we won't cover them here.

Now let's get you using those correct ways.

How to Break the Ice

Breaking the ice the right way lets you build, escalate, and guide an interaction without it becoming top-heavy and the girl having to exit from too much tension. It's how you keep things rolling smooth, steady, and under control.

You'll start encountering tension a lot more as you get your fundamentals down and become a sexy man implementing the principles of nonverbal attraction. Tension is great - it's powerful stuff - but you've got to keep your thumb on it or it can get out of hand, especially if you're too attractive (yes, this is very possible, especially once your fundamentals are tight... and even if you aren't naturally good-looking; "hot" and "handsome" are two very different things).

Let's dive into each of the five ways you can use, at various stages of your interactions, to break the ice.

Verbally Opening

Opening women verbally is how you break the "stranger" tension that occurs between you and a woman before you first meet. Before you say "hello," she's wondering:

• "Is this guy normal?"
• "Is this guy a weirdo?"
• "Is this guy super sexy?"
• "Is this guy a serial killer?"
• "Is this guy going to sweep me off my feet?"
• "Is this guy the man of my dreams?"
• "Is this guy even going to say hello?"

Especially if you are edgy, or you've otherwise caught her interest, she's going to be wondering about you, and she is not going to know. She probably won't be wondering everything from that list above, but she'll probably be wondering a bunch of them.

The first question that might come to your mind if you've been reading the site for a while may well be, "Why doesn't pre-opening count as an ice-breaker? It gets her looking at you and excited!" and if you're wondering that, that's exactly why: because it gets her wondering what you're going to say and nervous or excited.

Pre-opening - when you touch a woman prior to saying something to her verbally, in order to get her looking at you, first - increases tension, which is a big part of why it makes your opening so much more effective - the pre-open heightens her anticipation, and it makes your opener all that much sweeter and longed for when you finally deliver it (and break the ice you escalated via pre-opening).

How do you open her verbally and break the ice? You can use:

• A direct opener
• Indirect direct
• Indirect game

... or you could even just say "hi" (or, as one other alternative, ask her if she knows how much a polar bear weighs). The exact words aren't important (although if you want those, check out the links above); rather, what she's really paying attention to when you open her verbally is your voice tone, your facial expressions, and your eye contact.

And if your voice is strong and appealing, your facial expressions are natural and relaxed, and your eye contact is direct and focused, when you deliver your verbal opener, she'll be put at ease - now she knows what the deal is (that you're an attractive man who'd like to get to know her - that's the impression you want her to have, in any event).

Now, stranger tension defused and her biggest concerns set at ease, you're free to move to the next stage of the interaction.

Verbal Humor / Playfulness

There are times - particularly once you have a potent sexy vibe down and women find themselves drawn to you and very attracted right away - that you'll have little or no conversational tension to cut through, and you can move straightaway to escalating things as quickly as possible and getting girls alone with you.

However, before you reach that point, and much of the time even after you do, you'll be dealing with conversational tension.

Like stranger tension, conversational tension comes in a variety of different flavors:

• "Is he going to be a social burden?"
• "Are we going to sit here talking about the same thing all day / night?"
• "Is he interested in what I'm talking about?"
• "Does he find me impressive?"
• "Is this going anywhere?"
• "Does he like me?"
• "Does he want me?"
• "Am I talking too much?"
• "Whoa... this is getting WAY too intense!"
• "Whoa... how did we get onto talking about my past?"
• "Wow, this is great... but what should I say next?"
• "Have I told him too much about me?"
  

But unlike with stranger tension, you have a couple of options for defusing that tension and breaking the ice. We'll discuss verbal humor and playfulness first.

The function of verbal humor and playfulness is to let her know that this is not a big deal. This conversation is between friends; you can feel relaxed and at ease around me. You can be upfront and honest with me. We can be comfortable here.

Why this works is because the heavier a conversation is, the more a woman feels like she has to tiptoe and get every answer RIGHT. And if the pressure becomes TOO great, the best answer can simply be to run away... she exits the conversation.

If you're new to cold approaching women, or you can remember back when you were, you know this feeling: it's the one where you've gone up, met a girl, started talking to her, and things were actually going well... but then you didn't know what to say next, the pressure was too great, and so you just said, "Well, great meeting you!" and you left.

Why'd you leave? Because you couldn't take the heat - and this is the same reason why women will exit conversations with you if you can't break the ice when it gets too thick.

This is why you normally want to kick an interaction off with repartee; a few light lines of banter in the beginning let her know you're not going to give her an overly-intense conversation that feels like she's being grilled and makes her want to run for the hills. A little humor at the outset of an interaction defuses fears of you being a social burden, as well as fears of an awkward conversation. "Okay, this guy's cool," goes the thinking, "I can put my guard down and talk to him."

This is also why I tell you to mix up some humor and chase framing with your deep diving; it stops things from getting too heavy and crashing. By periodically coming back to the surface and breaking the ice, you keep your conversation moving at an even keel.

For more resources on humor and playfulness, or exact instructions on how to pull these off, check these articles out:

• Chase Framing
• How to Flirt with a Girl
  
• Teasing a Girl the Right Way
• How to Be Playful: 4 Tips You'll NEED

Note on nonverbal playfulness: you can also be playful with women nonverbally, but I didn't include this here because, like pre-opening, nonverbal playfulness actually increases anticipation, building the tension she feels up more.

That's not to say you shouldn't do it - it's powerful, great stuff. But when it comes to letting some steam out of the interaction and letting it cool down a bit, use verbal humor to break the ice.

Verbally Stating Your Interest

Verbally stating your interest is an alternative means of reducing in-conversation tension without resorting to humor. This includes:

• Qualifying women
• Telling women flat out that you like them or think they're cute

Normally, you'll want to use this in conjunction with verbal humor and playfulness to keep tension manageable; sometimes you'll qualify, sometimes you'll use humor.

How do you differentiate?

• Use showing interest as a reward for when she tries to impress you or says something you want to reinforce

• Use self-deprecating humor when you detect her trying to put herself on your level where your value is significantly higher than hers and you need to look "more human"

• Employ light teasing when she feels like her value is higher than yours and you need to challenge her a bit because she tries to be competitive with you, one-up you, or act dismissive or superior

Verbally stating your interest allows her to release conversational tension that's related to the build up of excitement around you (where she's thinking, "Oh God, I hope he likes me!") and she's been working to impress you. If you don't let her build up enough tension before you break the ice here, the effect isn't very strong; but if you let the tension become too great she'll auto-reject and go cold.

Learning to use this properly means learning to let her build up just enough tension that she is very hopeful you like her... and then you qualify her, or tell her you think she's cute, or a pretty cool girl, and release some of that tension she's carrying.

Kissing on the Mouth

Now we move into releasing sexual tension. This is the really fun stuff! It's where you take this beautiful woman you've just met, who's very much attracted to you, and make her "yours"... whatever that may mean to you.

When you've built up sexual tension inside of her, only a few thoughts are now racing through a woman's head:

• "Should I do it with him?"
• "Is he going to do it?"

One way of defusing sexual tension is to just TELL her: "I want to make love to you." However, this pops the bubble, the tension completely disappears, and now she's able to unemotionally answer those questions in his head: "Is he going to do it?" "Yes he is." "Should I do it with him?" => this will be answered depending on a flat evaluation of the value you offer to her life. And unless you offer nothing but pure lover value and there is a strong aura of scarcity about you, it will normally result in an answer of, "No, it's better if I wait."

So telling her you want her is usually out, because unless you're on vacation and you're never going to see her again this often leads you in completely the wrong way.

Verbal, then is out. Nonverbal, in this case, is in.

Because what's being wondered about here IS the physical act ITSELF, these nonverbal tactics serve to release the tension here, rather than increase it, as many other forms of nonverbal interaction do.

The first of these is kissing.

I normally recommend never kissing a girl when you're not alone with her, for precisely the reason that kissing releases sexual tension and communicates your intentions (your intention is to mate).

And if you kiss her outside of your seduction location, she's going to go logical again - the ice is broken, and - Oh! You do want to sleep with her! Great, now that she knows that - let's put that off a bit, and we can always do it later if we want to.

And then it doesn't happen. Same as verbally telling her, unless you have nothing but lover value to offer, kissing her anywhere other than the place you're going to then escalate immediately to intimacy in will lead you to an interaction ended a bit too early.

There is one exception to this, however, and that's the spontaneous kiss we talked about in "How to Kiss a Girl." If you execute it properly as described in that article - a quick burst of a kiss out of the middle of nowhere, and then a resumption of things as if it never happened - this can release some sexual tension if it's built up too high (e.g., she's very turned on, and you're afraid she'll crash before you're able to get her alone somewhere with you) while still keeping her guessing as to your ultimate intentions.

Sexual Intercourse

Bet you weren't expecting to find sex as one of your options in an article on how to break the ice, were you? But in fact, if you create and manage tension appropriately, sex serves as the ultimate ice-breaker.

The goal is to get her back alone with you, dying to know if you're going to sleep with her or not.

A properly-managed seduction is one in which the only way for a woman to gain the full release of tension she seeks is through sexual intercourse - through mating. When you achieve seductions managed this well, you'll find that women are extremely aroused by the time you begin intercourse, and that you're able to make a girl orgasm more quickly and easily here than at almost any other time with almost any other girl. The anticipation is so great that the release that is intercourse is almost overpowering for her.

How does kissing play into this?

Well, you'll find that not kissing women on the mouth actually makes it easier to sleep with them. Far less last minute resistance than if you do, and far more willingness to get right to it, in search of that tension release. Crazy, right?

You can't always pull this off - some girls need you to kiss them on the mouth to allay some of their tension and anxiety in order to relax enough for intercourse. But when you can - when you can start kissing them not on their mouths, but on their necks, faces, shoulders, chests, breasts, arms, and everywhere else - when you can escalate this way, and never give a girl the mouth kiss she'll be seeking for that much-needed release, you'll find that intercourse happens far more easily than usual.

And once you're making love to her, you can kiss her on the mouth as much as you want.

Wrapping Up "How to Break the Ice"

Here's the summary: tension is an extremely powerful tool for ramping up attraction and desire, but if you let it get too heavy, women will auto-reject or simply leave to escape the pressure.

Solution? Verbally breaking the ice in earlier stages, and physically breaking the ice in the endgame of a seduction.

Nonverbal (physical) interaction builds tension, because it generates sexual anticipation. So earlier on, you need to use verbal dialogue to break the ice and reduce some of this tension to more manageable levels. However, as you enter the late stage of a seduction, it becomes time to give a woman the full release of her tension - this will either be kissing or sex. If you opt for kissing, realize that this makes it typically much more difficult to move onto sex.

Your paths for breaking the ice are:

"Stranger" Tension

1. Verbally opening

Conversational Tension

2. Verbal humor / playfulness
3. Verbally stating your interest
   

Sexual Tension

4. Kissing on the mouth
   
5. Sexual intercourse

Typically you'll alternate between verbal humor and verbal qualifying or interest stating, and normally you'll kiss prior to intercourse, although it's far better if you wait to kiss until you're in your seduction location, and if you can escalate to intercourse without kissing her on the mouth you'll find things far better still (and she'll find them far more exciting and erotic).

And there's everything you ever wanted to know and more on how to break the ice with that cute girl you spied out of the corner of your eye.

No polar bears required.

Yours,
Chase Amante

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