Pickup Tech

A buddy of mine recently asked me to write on how to meet girls in groups, as it's something I don't talk about a great deal on here. The most I've touched on the topic before has been in "Breaking Circle," the post on maintaining attraction despite distractions around you or even other people trying interrupt you.

But, as my friend noted, I haven't gotten a proper treatment on meeting women in groups up yet, so this is it.

Meeting girls in groups is one of those things that, assuming you're doing much nighttime approaching, you're going to run into reasonably regularly. In fact, it may very well be the meat and potatoes of your approaches -- you might just find yourself in groups most of the time.

Groups aren't ideal, of course. Things tend to move faster and more smoothly the majority of the time when it's just you and your girl, and there are no interruptions or distractions to knock the two of you off course.

However, when handled appropriately, any negatives of groups can usually be negated, and in fact you can sometimes even get groups working for you with the women you meet. So it doesn't always have to be unfortunate that that pretty girl you like is in the middle of a group -- sometimes groups make it even easier for the two of you to get together.

Unless you exclusively meet women by yourself, sooner or later you're going to have a buddy along with you when you meet a new girl or two. And what your buddy does -- and what you do -- can go a long way toward determining the outcome of that encounter.

There are, it seems, as many prescriptions out there on how to be a wingman as there are on how to become a millionaire, or how to get six-pack abs. But, you know me -- I don't tend to agree with too much of the advice that's out there. I usually find it overcomplicated and too "fancy."

Like, if you want great abs, you don't get the Super Ab Roller 3000 and start rubbing lotions on your stomach to melt away the fat. Instead, you just scale down the number of calories you're taking in and cut your carbs to drop the belly that's hiding your abs, and regularly hit the gym, go grab a bar above your head, and start lifting your knees up against your chest until your abs are on fire a couple times a week to build up your abdominals. Presto, great abs without magic machines or mysterious ointments.

Learning how to be a wingman is like that. You'll get all kinds of crazy advice out there -- some of which I'll highlight today, as examples of what not to do, before we get into what to do. But you'll be better off avoiding all that crazy advice, and instead sticking to what works.

If you're like me and you come from a background of being low attainability with girls -- teasing them a little too hard, seeming a little too aloof, causing them to clam up and get cold and snippy and dismissive -- or if you started off as a nice guy and ended up swinging to the opposite extreme, you'd probably be inclined to thinking screening and qualifying is the best thing since sliced bread. I know I sure was.

Screening and qualifying is an effective way of finding out if a girl meets your standards. If you're just starting out with women, of course, most of those "standards" are arbitrary standards you're putting up for the sake of seeming like you're being picky; but as you accumulate more success with women, you really do become a lot pickier.

So how do you find out if a girl's your kind of girl? Well, you screen her and, when she passes your screens, you qualify her. At least, that's the standard advice.

What I've realized lately though is that stand-alone screening and qualifying -- even at its acme, its highest levels -- it's still a technique best suited to beginners and early intermediates.

Why? Because, one, screening and qualifying as a stand-alone technique is clumsy. It's unnatural, and it feels contrived. And in fact, as you start getting better, there's something a lot more natural you can use in this approach's place.

The post "Should You Pay for a Date?" is still, it appears, attracting its fair share of outrage from what seems mostly to be women, who don't like the fact that I'm recommending, based on my own experiences and all of those of every man I'm acquainted with whose tried both ways, that men not pay for their dates if they want better results with girls.

These commentators are protesting, of course, because doesn't fit with the way they think the world ought to work.

But I don't write this blog to talk to people about the way the world ought to work. It'd be great if men could just buy women dinner and women would automatically upon the completion of that romantic date then become the men's lovers, girlfriends, and wives immediately thereafter.

That's not what happens, though. And what this site is about is what does happen -- what works, what doesn't, and everything in between.

So let's settle this, then. I've decided to craft for you, today, the definitive post on how to get girls. After reading this post, your core questions on how to be successful with women are all going be answered -- and any of you ladies reading on here, buckle yourselves in because we're going to take an intensive, in-depth look at the way you choose the men you do.

Think for a moment of a time you were talking to a pretty girl you'd just met. You started hitting it off -- things were going great. You took the conversation deeper and deeper -- getting to know her more and more. It felt like the two of you were bonding at this incredibly close level, and it kept getting closer. There was more and more magic... more and more chemistry... crazy amounts of electricity sparking in the air...

... then, suddenly, the spell was broken. It was like the two of you came up for air, then realized that you'd emerged back up at the surface and couldn't get back down to where you were before.

It was as if you'd awakened from a dream.

Then, try as you might, you couldn't get back into that dream again... and both of you knew it. The interaction with this girl -- this girl you'd been bonding and connecting with so deeply mere minutes before -- ended soon after.

It became too awkward to continue once it'd returned to that surface level of shallow conversation and superficiality, and she uncomfortably excused herself, telling you she had to go find her friends or that it was time for her to head home.

But you were close -- you knew you were. There was so much intensity between the two of you, until it just... evaporated.

A few days ago, a reader going by the name of Jimbob asked a very good question about feigning disinterest or playing hard to get with women. Here's the segment of his comment that had to do with it (I've added a few paragraph splits to increase readability):

"But anyway what I wanted to ask you is regarding what I sometimes read about when I stumble on to PUA forums or other dating websites. Apparently you're supposed to mix showing interest and feigned disinterest with girls, to make them want you more and try and come after you a little bit and win your approval.

"I've never really tried this consciously, but in my experience showing interest and then showing a lack of interest for whatever reason results in the girl recoiling as if she has been rejected and then she feigns disinterest with the “Oh, I wasn’t really interested in him" attitude you mentioned. Even with really beautiful girls I've seen this, they rarely respond positively to interest mixed with disinterest, sometimes they just act confused, once I actually saw a look of anguish on this girls face because she thought I was rejecting her by not flirting with her, after that she ignored me for quite a while.

"I think it's maybe a self esteem issue or issues they have surrounding rejection, or maybe they've been burnt too many times, but it seems that even the beautiful women have average self esteem these days (I live in the UK by the way). Maybe because they're so gorgeous they're used to guys hounding them 24/7 so if you show disinterest they take it literally, I don't know, but to me it seems like a pointless and hit and miss technique."

Jimbob, this is a great, sharp observation on your part. It took me about 2-3 years of actively approaching women and trying to improve with them before I started noticing this:

Playing too hard to get costs you women. Lots of women, quite often.

Why does playing too hard to get lose you women? Jimbob touched on the answer in his comment -- and I'm going to take you down that rabbit hole in this post.

In the post on how to get foreign girls, a reader named swingcat (no relation to the other guy!) asks the following:

There are quite a few Chinese girls I know who ONLY speak Chinese and who told me they always dreamt of meeting a foreigner. Out of experience I know that with nightgame you can pull girls without speaking a single word. What about daygame however? And for nightgame, how can you go beyond SNLs without being able to communicate?

You mention leading. Yes, that is indespensable but how do you establish comfort or comfort? How do you non-verbally qualify? Maye you can post some examples orFRs, since you mention that you have quite a few of these experiences. I think this would be really helpful.

Basically, he asks how do you move things forward with a woman you can't (or prefer not to) communicate with?

Which, I think, is a great question.

You won't just use this with women who don't speak your language. I use a lot of what is to follow in my regular interactions with women who are native or fluent English speakers, too.

But, you ask, why choose to go wordless rather than make use of verbiage-laden, well-worded conversation? Well, that's a part of what we'll talk about here today.