Pickup Tech

Why is it that most men can't seem to get what they want with women? How come so many men can't get a girl?

A few months back, a friend of mine asked me to author a post on leading women. I put it off for a while, because it's not as sexy a topic as, say, opening or locking in or overcoming objections or dating. Leading's just... a little vague, as far as topics go.

Yes, it's good to be an alpha male, and it's good to have a set process you follow, and to move on fast if a girl isn't following along. But how's that all come into play in a cohesive strategy for getting success with women?

If you'd like to achieve anything resembling consistent, reliable success with women, you're quickly going to realize that leaving things purely up to chance isn't going to cut it. "God helps those who help themselves," goes the saying -- which, boiled down, quite basically means that good things come to the people who go out and actively bring good things into their lives.

In other words, success comes to those who engineer that success.

But still, most folks don't bother engineering anything approximating success. Most average folks sit around waiting for success to find them. And it never does.

For success with women to start occuring for a guy, that has to change for him. So what's it take to advance an average man who can't get a girl into a man who consistently can?

Well, among other things, it takes this: he's got to be leading women.

Every guy's beaten himself up over how to ask out a girl he likes.

She's there, she looks great, you want to ask her out... so bad... but you just can't form the words. Or maybe even approach her in the first place.

Making the ask, as hard as it seems now, is, in fact, remarkably easy to do once you have a few simple tools to do it...

However, you can spend endless amounts of time stressed out over it when you don't.

So let's give you some AWESOME tips to making asking girls out SIMPLE.

Before we get to tips, a quick story.

When I was 14 years old, I asked a girl out for the first time.

I walked up to her in front of the whole school (her name was Sarah), and flat out asked her to go to the school dance at the end of the year with me.

She was the prettiest, most popular girl in school (not to mention head cheerleader), and she'd flirted with me and chased me hard for a year.

In fact, she'd asked me out about 6 months earlier (but I was too scared to say "yes")!

Yet by the time I finally asked her out, she'd given up on me -- the window had passed, and so had my shot with Sarah.

At the time I didn't know you only had a certain window of time to ask a girl out in... though I guessed something like that might be the case.

I soon found out it definitely was.

As you could've guess, Sarah said "no" to me, albeit in a very gracious way.

She told me she wanted "to be friends first", which I knew meant we weren't going to the dance together.

I never got a date with Sarah.

However, in the many years after, I eventually asked hundreds of girls out on dates. Some said no... but many more said yes.

And along the way, I've learned a thing or two about how to ask a girl out and get that "yes."

I've planned to write on how to ask girls out for a while now. However, a reader just wrote in asking about asking girls out specifically -- so, it's time to cover it. Our reader says:

“Man chase I really have been in a funk lately. I'm back in school and I feel like a social retard now lol! I need some advice, I really need help with asking girls out on dates and what that actually looks like you know? I'm reading your articles and a lot of it is making sense but closing the deal and getting dates is weird for me. I guess I really haven't actually asked a girl out on a proper date before my last GF I got with because I was able to escalate things with her fast.”

To answer our reader's question, I've put together this guide to asking women out.

This guide will teach you -- emphatically, unequivocally, and without fluff, huff, or pomp of any kind -- how to ask a girl out... and always (or almost always, anyway!) get a "yes."

A few conversations I've had lately have revolved around me discussing with guys how simple things are with women. You just talk to them, and then... boom! They chase after you. You don't even have to do any work; girls take care of all that themselves.

Because that's how it's been for me lately. But I keep getting pulled back down to reality; guys confess it doesn't work that way for them. And then I stop and think, and for a long time it didn't work that way for me, either.

What changed it for me? Well, one of the biggest factors was figuring out what to say to girls. All you've got to do is get that figured out, and you're set.

But that's tough, you say. Why? Well, because you're not a girl. And if you're like a lot of guys out there, you have, starting out, no idea what it is women want to hear, what they like to hear, or what they need to hear, whatsoever.

Here's how it goes for most guys: they start out talking to women too literally, and the women get bored out of their skulls and leave. So then a guy tries a few witty pick up lines, or he tries busting on girls to be a challenge, only to have them start snapping at him and shutting down. Eventually he comes full circle again and decides to try to be a lot nicer than he was, only to find that, once again, the challenge has disappeared and the interest women showed at least some of the time when he was being a jerk has disappeared.

That's the point a guy realizes that, despite all the time he might've spent trying to get better with women, he still has no real idea about what to say to girls.

Argh.

Fortunately, all's not lost, and you can figure it out. In fact, that's why I made this post -- it's something of a guide on the wild, woolly world of talking to girls. In other words, herein lies the machete you'll need to hack a path through the conversational jungle and emerge on the other side with that beautiful, smiling girl you've had your eye on.

I had a date Friday night with a young television anchor for one of the big TV stations in China and Hong Kong. Things started out innocently enough -- she put me in the hot seat early on, treating me almost like how I imagine she must treat her interviewees, asking me lots of questions and making it feel like an interview -- but I soon wrested control of the flow of conversation, and pretty soon things were going swimmingly. I used something known as the cold read to do it.

Before you knew it we were well into a deep dive, her telling me all about her past relationships and what she thinks the purpose of life is and what she really wants (children, namely). And it all happened, despite a little while of me being there in the hot seat, more or less effortlessly.

Even not so long ago, I struggled with transitioning into "real" conversation when I was facing women who were professional "talkers" -- reporters, saleswomen, any kind of gal who spoke effusively for a living. The problem was, women like that tend to snap into these routines of making their pitch or going into interview mode, and it can be hard to snap them out of it.

What I ended up returning to to solve this dilemma was something I've developed slowly -- almost unconsciously -- over the past half decade: cold reading.

It's largely because of cold reading that I had this girl who was so used to steering the conversation instead drinking in every moment with me, and by extension it's largely because of cold reading that I had this girl telling me how she'd drank too much (after a mere two drinks, spread across 2 1/2 hours) and all but announcing that I should invite her home to make some bad decisions.

If you've ever tried to take a girl home with you, or you've ever been in a relationship, you know that sometimes women need persuading. And when it comes to persuading women, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this was a near-universal point of suffering for most men.

About two months ago I wrote a post asking "should you apologize to women?" At the beginning of that post, I mentioned the television boyfriend and husband of the 1990s -- you know, that poor, beaten-down soul constantly stumbling over himself to belt out another apology to his scowling girlfriend or wife.

Well, this is the other thing the TV boyfriend / husband does really poorly -- persuade women to do what he wants. Men on TV are usually depicted as trying and failing to get women to do what they want, instead.

"Oh, come on!" you'll hear a guy cry to a gal. "It'll be fun!"

She just looks at him, shakes her head, and ignore his request. He groans, dejectedly. Again, the audience laughs.

Now, if you want to do better than that guy, you're going to have to take a different approach than the (largely ineffectual) one that he takes. And to get you doing just that, I've got 7 tips for you today that are going to change the way you handle persuading women.

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.