Mindsets

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.

Going to venture into morally questionable territory here, so bear with me. Even if you don’t agree with my decision to get intimate anyway with a girl who loved her boyfriend (though she clearly did quite a lot to put herself in the position to get together with me), I still think the topic we’re going to discuss will be well worth your time, so do read on.

Last night I met a girl for the first time through a social network I’m a part of who was visiting from Shanghai. She was a cute 25 year-old socialite and event manager who was in town to organize a big event at the Water Cube and seemed eager to meet up with me. Good so far.

We met up and grabbed some food and a drink each and talked about the usual stuff: life, goals, dreams, et cetera. Then she mentioned that she would never trust Italian men again, and that Italian men lied, and I was curious, so asked her more.

Probably by now you have your New Year’s resolutions all done up and set to go for 2011, and you’re charged up and (hopefully) already setting to work turning those resolutions into reality.

I’ve always been a little anti-New Year’s resolutions myself, but that mostly because I’m just kind of a humbug, contrarian kind of cat. When I stop and think about it, I often do set a number of goals at the very beginning of the year, which for all intents in purposes are, in fact, resolutions for the new year. So, I grudgingly accept that now I, despite my protestations otherwise, do in fact make New Year’s resolutions. And they do, in fact, help.

So if you’re a little on the lazy side, or a bit of a humbug like me, and you don’t usually do resolutions for the next year, I invite you to do things a little different this year and join me in setting a few goals for yourself in 2011.

Today I found myself reading an article on the Washington Post’s website titled “Date Lab: A Matchmaking Year in Review”. It was all about these blind dates that the newspaper had sent people on throughout the year. I clicked through and read about each of the dates discussed, and paid attention to why the dates that didn’t pan out didn’t. For every single one of them, it came down to the same exact story as what I used to read when things didn’t work out in the monthly Pacific Beach magazine in Pacific Beach, San Diego, where they’d also have a blind date they sent a pair of readers out on each month.

I’ve come to the conclusion, based on my own experiences, that of friends, and of all these blind dates I’ve read about, that dating doesn’t work out the majority of the time because the guy doesn’t measure up. If you read about the blind dates that don’t work out in that Washington Post article, you’ll notice a similar thread through all of them: the guy says When I saw her, I definitely was physically attracted to her, and the girl says When I saw him, I instantly knew he was not my type.

Why is this so consistently the case?

There’s this thing called approach anxiety, and I haven’t talked about it all that much, because it was never a huge concern for me personally, and it was always something I was able to push through okay on my own. Sure, sometimes I’d stiffen up and miss out on a girl I should’ve had, but all in all it was never too bad for me. I had a lot of fears as a kid, and got into the habit early of overcoming them by confronting them head on; this might be why I was never overly concerned with this one. I just tackled it the same as the rest of them.

But for some guys, approach anxiety is crippling. I’ve coached men who would at times simply refuse to approach women; I eventually got pretty good at getting guys to approach, even when they were terrified to (the first few approaches are always the toughest), but how does a guy who’s shaken about going up to meet women do that on his own, without a coach there to work him through it?

Don’t forward this post to any feminists.

There’s a lot of animosity among men in the West toward women these days, and a lot of it, I’m quite sure, ties back to the efforts women have made to change their image. Fifty years ago in America, if you watch old television shows, women are quite often depicted as silly and cute; they did and said the darnedest things, and men would look upon them with expressions that said, without words, “Aw.. ain’t she just so silly and cute?”

Nowadays, a woman being depicted that way on television, and a man looking at a woman that way, would be demonized as outdated and humiliating. “Women need to be taken seriously,” we’re told; “that’s the only way they’ll be treated as equals.”

So most men in the West no longer view women as silly and cute. Instead, they view them as scary, intimidating creatures who will bite their heads off should they dare to view women as anything less than ferocious beasts and equals; “men in skirts”, if you will.

Taking a step back from our usual breakdowns and analyses, I want to focus on something that’s been on my mind for the better part of, oh, my entire career in seduction: what do you owe a woman you’ve brought into your life?

I consider myself a pretty exceptional guy. I mean, I’ve always been a man of extremes, and women have always been cast to the emotional extremes around me – they love me, they hate my guts, they love me again, they want to stab me in the back and get revenge on me, then they come to me and tell me I’m a man with a good heart and the best experience of their lives. And I have focused hard on developing myself in as many ways as possible, to provide as much unique value to the lives of those around me as possible – the women in my life being no exception. I bond with the women I spend time with like no one in their lives ever has, and I take them to bed better than anyone ever has or ever will. In long-term relationships, I try to take girls on fun / unique / amazing experiences, and do things with them that other boyfriends might be scared to do. I want every woman I’m with to be able to look back on me and say, “Chase was the experience of a lifetime.”

But when you build expectations like this, sometimes you aren’t always able to meet them. Sometimes a girl sees you and likes you so much that she wants all of your time; and you wish you could give it to her, but you simply can’t. I tell girls now; I tell them forthrightly, “I can’t promise you anything. I could be gone tomorrow and might not be back for years.” Yet, they still fall hard for me and want as much from me as they can get.