Reactions from Women, or Results with Women?

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.

Back in 2006, when I first met guys in the pick up community – aside from the training I took with the guy I’d personally credit as the most talented seducer I’ve ever seen, and aside from the friend and wingman I took on when I moved to Washington, DC after a year and a half of going out alone – and continuing on as I met more and more of them, I noticed them doing something I found both mystifying, and personally frustrating: they were entertaining girls.

They’d approach women high energy, be very playful and fun and lively, and do all the work. The women would sit back and enjoy as these men labored to display higher value and tell impressive stories. And the women would laugh and flirt and smile and touch the guys and act excited. And then, once the they’d done the best job they possibly could and exhausted all of their fun / interesting / entertaining stuff, the women would… drum roll… smile, tell them it was nice meeting them, and then casually walk off.

And then these guys’d call it a job well done and go do it to the next girl. They collected tons of reactions out of women, but women kept walking away, and walking away, and walking away. Success seemed like a distant goal for these guys, a land they were trying to slowly make their way towards a little bit at a time.

I tried the entertaining thing very briefly when I’d first discovered the pick up community at the end of 2005. I spent about a month using opinion openers on girls in nightclubs and trying to tell impressive stories. And they got me a lot of excited girls, but it didn’t seem like the right kind of excitement. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was at the time, but these days I can tell you what it was I was sensing, and what, apparently, a lot of guys new to meeting women don’t pick up on until much later in their seduction careers.

Going for Reactions

Sometimes I think I must have entered seduction with a stronger social intuition than most guys; and that might be partially true, but from training guys what I tend to see is that most men have social intuitions that work just fine. They just don’t listen to them.

If you point something out to a guy he wasn’t paying attention to socially before, he’ll quite often go, “Oh, yeeaahhhh, so thaaat’s why XYZ happens when I do ABC.” It clicks, he gets it, and it makes sense. The fact that it clicks shows he must have been picking up on the fact that something was amiss; he just wasn’t paying that feeling much (if any) heed, is all.

What happens when you don’t pay attention to your intuition is that you make mistakes and things go awry. That’s as true for meeting women as it is for choosing which school to attend or not getting jumped in the wrong part of town. I’m convinced most men have a little voice in the back of their heads telling them not to entertain women, but they rather ignore that voice and go on ahead with it anyway because they don’t consciously realize the error in it or can’t see any alternative.

The problem with reactions is that they feel like success. “That girl was flirting with me!” a guy will say. “She was playing with her hair like crazy!” “She couldn’t keep her hands off me!” “She made out with me in the bar!” “She was staring at me hard through our entire conversation!” Well sure, yeah, that sounds like a great night.

Whenever I hear a guy saying stuff like this now, though, my instinctive first thought is, “Okay, cool; but, did he shag her?” Because if the answer is no, I’m willing to bet you that a week from now, she will totally have forgotten sitting there for an hour starting intently at him and playing with her hair. She won’t remember anything about it.

Now, disclaimer: I don’t want to say looking for reactions is bad. There do give you some indication you’re making progress, so they’re not all bad, and especially early on if you’re starting out at a beginner’s level, you need to look for positive reinforcement like reactions because it’ll probably take a little time as you work on your fundamentals before you’re able to reach a point where you’re able to start generating results with women regularly.

But the big, overall point I want to make is this: reactions from women do not equal results with women.

Reactions Do Not Equal Results

In early 2007, I was getting more bold with women and pushing for things earlier in the interaction when I thought I might be able to pull them off, and I started being surprised at some things. Women who were being attentive to me, who were playing with their hair, smiling, gazing into my eyes, who seemed for all the world to be interested in me, sometimes would refuse to move with me. And sometimes they’d even refuse me their cell phone numbers.

Later that year I also began getting bolder with girls who weren’t as openly receptive to me, and I was intrigued to note that sometimes, women who gave me no outward sign of interest would go along with me and continue letting me progress things forward despite their lack of external indication of attraction for me.

Both of these things were a little strange, but eventually I got used to them, got used to pushing things forward regardless of whether I was getting reactions or not, and targeting my actions toward generating results with women rather than reactions from women.

What did I count as results? By “results,” what I was counting was anything concrete I got from girls that progressed an interaction forwards. Hair-tossing and eyelash-batting need not apply. These days, here’s what I’d consider “results” now:

• A girl moving with you when you invite her to move with you.
• A girl moving to sit somewhere alone with you.
• A girl deflecting difficult social situations – like pushy friends or needy male suitors – specifically in order to spend more time with you.
• A girl joining you one-on-one on a date (as opposed to hanging with you at a bar or a party or with friends).
• A girl coming home with you.
• A girl getting intimate with you.

To me, those are results. Going for anything else is distracting you from moving the interaction ahead.

The problem with those distractions is, though… those distractions are what many men go for. Many men are aiming for getting girls to toss their hair back, or laugh, or touch them on the arm. Many men are aiming to get women flirting. Many men are aiming to get girls to grind with them on the dance floor. But that girl who’s doing those things is just as likely to walk away a minute later, because those things alone do not equal commitment to you and the interaction she’s having with you. Those things can very well simply be all in good fun.

I’ve seen lots of guys doing showy “flash” game that gets girls acting hyper and bubbly and energetic and bouncing excitedly up and down. But I’ve rarely seen those guys go home with those hyper, bubbly, energetic, bouncing girls. Usually, after the girl’s had her fill of good feelings, she rejoins her friends and bids a fond farewell to the man who was entertaining her, thanking him for a fun-filled evening.

He feels as though he’s accomplished something, because the girl seemed so happy. “I’m getting better and better at this!” he thinks to himself. “Women love me!”

But because he’s basing this off of reactions, that’s what he’s training himself to get: reactions. So he gets better and better and better at getting girls hyper and bubbly and energetic and bouncing excitedly up and down. But he doesn’t really get all that much better at taking girls home and sleeping with them, because he isn’t training for that.

He isn’t training to get results. He’s training to entertain. He’s training to get reactions.

He also isn’t being sexy, he’s being fun and entertaining, and the two are very different. If your aim is to get girls flirting with you and be partying with girls and having wild dance-a-thon types of nights, you should work on being fun and entertaining first and foremost. If your aim is to take women home and get together with them and become lovers or make them your girlfriends, you should work on being warm and sexy first and foremost.

It doesn’t have to be hard. You really shouldn’t have one woman walking away after another after another like the entertainer guys do once a girl’s hit her “fun quota.” Once you start pushing hard for results and pushing to make things happen, rather than pushing to get reactions, you start getting farther along in interactions more quickly on a more regular basis. And all it takes is training yourself to get results.

Training for Results with Women

Again, reactions aren’t bad; they’re just misleading when it comes to gauging efficacy at actually getting results.

I’ll give a few examples.

In my stint as a tire salesman, sometimes a customer would seem really gung-ho and excited about tires, and then not buy them. He’d excitedly tell me he’d think about it, then take off, never to be heard from again. Other times, a customer would be totally silent as I pitched a tire to him, and I’d feel like I was talking to a wall, but then I’d tell him we could get him right in and get him done in thirty minutes and we could start right now, and he’d say, “Okay,” and voila, I’d have a sale.

I also spent a few months as a middle school and high school teacher, and something I’d see there sometimes would be kids who’d be nodding and saying, “Oh, I see,” dead serious and looking for all the world as if they totally grasped what I was talking about. But when I’d call on them to answer questions, some of them knew it, and some of them were clueless. Other kids would sit there silent as stones, not giving me any feedback at all while I lectured, but when I’d call on them, sometimes they’d prove to be more knowledgeable than the kids who were nodding so emphatically.

Reactions do not equal results. I really want to drive this home. Just because she’s flirting with you doesn’t mean you’re going to get together with her – and just because she isn’t doesn’t mean you aren’t.

The only way you train yourself up to be a guy who produces results is to continue to push for results, irrespective of reactions. Pay attention to reactions, but don’t use them as an absolute metric and instead push on anyway. We touched on this a bit in “When in Doubt, Forge Ahead”; you must get into the habit of pushing to move interactions forward no matter how a girl seems to be reacting to you. She should be the one who decides whether she wants to go along with you or not; you must be the one who offers her the option.

These days, I am so unconcerned with reactions that I do almost nothing with women that’s reaction-generating. I don’t go for flashy openers; I go for really, really chill, very under-the-radar ones. Even when I open direct, it’s very… chill and natural. I’d be thrown off if a girl reacted crazily or energetically to one of my openers, actually; I’d probably think she was a psycho.

Don’t deny a woman the opportunity to be with you simply because she doesn’t seem to be reacting the way you think a girl who’s interested should react. She might be shy, or not especially gregarious or flirtatious, or maybe she’s in her head that day, or maybe she’s behaving more conservatively because people who know her are around, or maybe she likes you a lot and is scared of messing it up if she acts too interested, or who knows what the reason is. Whatever it is, you don’t want to miss out on a cute gal who digs you simply because you were too busy looking for reactions to go get results.

All right, well, this post didn’t turn out quite as short as I’d hoped, but it’s half the length of the last one if that counts. I’ll close it out on this note: that to be the guy who gets results with women, you need to be the guy who forges ahead without much concern for reactions.

Reactions are great for training your basic social calibration and basic-level meeting-women-skills; once you hit intermediate and advanced though, you need to drop reactions and specifically target results. Once you start doing that, you’ll begin seeing a steady upward trend in your success with women, and I guarantee once you start seeing that trend, you’ll heartily agree that better results with women trump better reactions from women any day of the week.

Yours,
Chase Amante