Mindsets

There are many common errors men make in dating. These errors sabotage in small ways or large ways with women. The errors put guys through endless frustrations... usually of their own doing.

We'll talk about an error today in the way guys often think about "next time." Because it's sort of a big one, but it's likely one you won't stop to reconsider too often.

If you sift back through your memories, I bet you will find instances where you thought "I'll do it next time." See a beautiful girl? "I'll talk to her next time." Talk to beautiful girl? "I'll ask her out next time." On a date with beautiful girl? "I'll ask her home next time." Home alone with beautiful girl? "I'll make a move on her next time." As soon as you read these, I know you know the thoughts are counterproductive. If you're like most men, you still have them sometimes anyway though, don't you?

What's not included are the 'next time' thoughts you don't have. Like "That girl rejected me, but I'll get it next time." Or "My approach sucked. Next time will be better." Or "It's all gone tits-up with this girlfriend. But I'll do things right with my next one."

Men have these 'positive next time' thoughts far less often than they should. Yet they are a key to staying sane in the moment, and heading off neediness before it crops up.

Guys get told they’re guilty of horrible double standards all the time. But are double standards actually a bad thing… and are they even real?

There is a strange phenomenon in urban places. Double standards come under attack.

Not all double standards, mind you. But certain ones.

Before you can put new beliefs in, first you must push past old bad beliefs that conflict. But what if you don’t even know you have them?

There are two sides to learning.

On the one hand, there's learning something new. This side is important. You need to learn new strategies to get what you want. You need new techniques. You must give yourself new mindsets, new behaviors, and new mental models. All this is vital.

There's another side though that's a lot more overlooked. This side is in many ways even more important than the first side (learning), because without it, the first side is tough or impossible. This second side is that of unlearning. It is the art of deprogramming.

Everyone knows when a cult member makes it out of a cult, he has to go through a long period of deprogramming. This is worst for children raised within that cult, where the cult is all they've ever known. People raised in a religion who reject that religion go through it. People raised outside religion who later embrace it go through it too. The unlearning -- the deprogramming -- is as crucial as and in many ways more crucial than the learning. Until a man deprograms himself of old beliefs, he doesn't have the room to take on much in the way of new ones.

Deprogramming lies at the heart of switching from an ineffective way of trying to get what you want to an effective way.

Yet, sometimes, some men are wholly resistant to deprogramming.

And when you can't deprogram a man, you can't reprogram him either.

Which is bad for all sorts of reasons, if his old program is not a good, useful, helpful one for him.

Is pickup just a bunch of snake oil? No, and you should take my word for it. After you’ve approached enough girls, you’ll wonder why you ever doubted.

A reader from my newsletter messaged me: “This pickup artist stuff is a scam. All women care about is looks. Pickup guys market to the insecure, selling snake oil.”

“So, how long have you been reading my blog?” I replied.

“About two years now.”

“Why?”

“For the lols.”

For the lols. Right.

It’s the old, eternal debate. Is all this pickup stuff for real, or just a huge set of lies created to sell BS e-courses to hapless, neckbeard virgins? And unless you’re 6’5” with six-pack abs, a full head of luscious hair, and are wealthy, you’ll never get anywhere.

Sorry, you short, bald, broke, fat old bastards. No love for you (unless you buy my book, link at the bottom of this post).

Usually, you should be skeptical. Skepticism is healthy and good.

Somebody is trying to sell you on a pyramid scheme with zero chance of failure? The Earth is actually flat, says your favorite YouTuber? Meth isn’t really that bad, and if you just try it once you’ll be fine?

Skepticism keeps you from wasting your time, health, and money on things that are potentially terrible for you. However, when it comes to self-improvement, skepticism won’t help you; it will hinder your progress.

That’s why so many religions and cults thrive. They depend on the true believers. But the believers also get something from the deal. They receive a community, or message, that helps them transcend or something.

You probably just want to get laid.

When I discovered the Mystery Method, I wasn’t skeptical; not at all. Why would I be? A magician in a top hat is telling me to use negs and magic tricks to sleep with Vegas supermodels. There’s absolutely nothing there to trigger skepticism.

Here’s the thing. All this information is free. Sure, Girls Chase has a subscription and paywall, and we sell an amazing course called One Date (among others), but that’s because we employ a dozen gurus, editors, programmers, video editors, and so on. These people have to eat. But if you Google “How to pick up girls,” between blogs, forums, and YouTube videos, you’ll find decades of material you can binge on for free.

The only benefit to paying for it is to support your favorite author, pinpoint specific niche material or masterful consolidations of the essentials in one beautiful package to speed up your learning process. But you don’t need to pay for it if you don’t need to save time.

Skepticism won’t help you.

You have to ask yourself, "Do I really want to learn?" Then you have to believe in the process, fully. You must let go of all doubt and embrace the path of learning game.

As long as you don’t give false expectations, you need not suffer from player guilt. In fact, denying her sex when she wants it is NOT the way to spare her feelings.

If you're a man, you'd be forgiven for getting mixed up by all the mixed messages society sends you about casual sex. You've probably heard all the following:

• "Casual sex is liberating! We must break the bonds of social restrains on sexuality! Let's enjoy our sexuality, and be free!"

• "Casual sex results from a power imbalance between men and women. Women are forced to trade sex to men sooner than they want to, in the hopes of securing a relationship. It puts women in a difficult spot where it's easy to get hurt."

• "Casual sex is one of the most empowering acts a woman can engage in. By embracing her sexuality, a woman can learn to love herself, and stop being dependent on how others think of her."

• "Casual sex is highly damaging to women, and the casual sex epidemic is doing long-term damage to women's self-esteem and ability to form long-term partnerships."

You're alternately a saint and a devil, a savior and a corrupter for engaging in any intimacy with women you know won't lead to marriage.

Of course, the fact is, humans have sex. And they don't always have sex for marriage. If there are a lot of available sexual partners, many humans will have sex with many of them. This is true regardless of location or era. It is true in the West, and it is true in the East. It is true now, it was true 100 years ago, and it was true 5,000 years ago.

The issue is, if you want to be a player, and you want to feel free to indulge in physical intimacy with women who want to enjoy that intimacy with you, how do you get past any feelings of wrongheadedness about this, or guilt?

If you're exclusively a monogamous sort of guy, this article won't apply to you at all.

However, if you ever find yourself in situations where you have one or more women you see regularly for sex, yet you're still on the dating scene, looking for new girls to pair up with, you will encounter this.

It's a phenomenon we might call The Girlfriend Pickup Dip.

The Dip looks like this: once you have a woman or two to tend to your sexual needs regularly, your motivation to seek new sex partners begins to dry up.

You grow less driven to secure new girls. Your tolerance for dating-related difficulties (like women flaking, testing you, or sending you mixed signals) erodes.

You may still go out, but the hunger isn't there. It's harder to get higher caliber women, too, despite everything you've been told: that high caliber women like guys who aren't needy, that women want men other women want, that women can 'smell' success... despite these things, when your drive isn't there, women can sense it, and that's the biggest thing. Because high caliber women want men who value them highly, and are willing to put a minimum level of investment in to get them.

Thus, as an almost inevitable consequence, as you bring more women into your life, and 'fill your pipeline' or 'fill up your rotation', you reach a point where your motivation to keep adding new women falls, and you are less-good at getting the really top notch girls you got at your hungriest, as well as just doing the same volume of new girls in general.

This is The Dip, and if you like multiple women in your life, it can be a thorn in your side.

A recent article on loneliness exploded to the top of Hacker News (the Reddit-like programming and entrepreneurship newsboard). The article clearly struck a chord. The thrust of the article was that the decline of the family has led to an epidemic of lonely people.

In the comment section below the article, a reader had this to say:

After numerous attempts to find a reasonable/semi-normal female "life-companion" I gave up at 50. I tried to overlook the hostility and conceit they had towards men in general at first, until neurosis and personality disorders would reveal themselves later - if the relationship got that far. I felt like I was in a competition and she was determined to "win".

It's many things, but the enmity and distrust that feminism has caused between men and women is by far the most significant contributor. Men are the "enemy" that must be defeated. Why are the majority of homeless white men? They surrendered.

It's a sentiment that seems to be bursting out of the stitches among more and more people. Women express similar sentiments as often as men -- this isn't a purely male issue.

At the core of it, the real center of the issue, is the cultural phenomenon of 'trust collapse'.

The great tragedy of our time is this breakdown in trust between the people... and, particular to this website's mission, the breakdown in trust between the sexes. When the sexes trust each other, anything is possible. When they do not, society comes undone at the seams.

The sexes have battled throughout history; a little tension is nothing new. Yet rarely does the fight grow as embittered as it's today become.

Today more and more women are distrustful toward men. They worry there are rapists behind every tree. They opine that women are paid less than men (and thus, implicitly undervalued). They jump when a stranger approaches, or chide men not to walk up to them in the first place. At the same time, they wonder where the good men have gone, and instruct men that now that they are ready to marry, it's time for those men to be ready too.

Just as women's trust in men has crumbled, so too has men's in women. Many men fear false accusations of harassment (described as "sometimes just a different perspective" in this article), false accusations of sexual assault, or false accusations of rape. Men with good careers walk on eggshells around female colleagues, wary not to become easy prey for unscrupulous corporate climbers (all a woman has to do is say a man did something to her, the same way the football player feigns injury to penalize his opponent and benefit his own team). Many men fear the power women wield in marriage courts, and the loss of their children and assets and lives in the event of a divorce. Some swear off marriage under current Western law; others swear off dating entirely. In a recent 'sexual harassment backlash' survey by the very feminist Lean In organization, 60% of male managers report now being uncomfortable mentoring, working alone with, or socializing outside of work with female employees.

While not everyone has caught it as bad as the more sensitive (and paranoid) among us, everyone has felt it to some extent. And plenty have felt it to large extent... between 2008 and 2018, a mere 10 year gap, the number of 18-29 year old men not having sex in America rocketed up from 10% of them to a whopping 28%.

As the relations between the sexes have increasingly frayed, more and more individuals have come out as preferring their own same sex instead. That number increased by 17% in only four years, between 2012 and 2016. Among millennials, in 2012, 5.8% were homosexual; just four years later, in 2016, a full 7.3% were out of the closet (so much for the ol' "only 1-2% of the population is gay" chestnut you used to hear, huh?). And the fertility rate in the U.S. hits new all-time lows pretty much every year.

How do make heads or tails of all this?

What is happening to the mating market in the West?

Is there any sense we can make of this at all, or is it all just a bunch of unfathomable deep civilizational processes, layers beneath layers, impossible to peel back?

Well, we're going to peel the layers back. And we'll see if we can arrive at an understanding of just what's afoot in all these tremors we've felt in the modern mating market.

Fortunately, there are white polished stones that lead the way us to follow. Let's see where those stones lead.