Social Life

Being unreactive to challenging situations is often the strongest option available to you. When a girl is testing you hard, someone is publicly belittling you, or things are just generally going crazy and spiraling out of control, the most nonplussed, nonchalant man typically wins: he shows dominance, control, and unflappability.

However, sometimes the calm of unreactiveness must be set aside, and situations simply need dealing with.

Sometimes the girl testing you needs to be set straight; sometimes person belittling you needs to be put in his place; sometimes the crazy situation requires you to place both hands on the wheel and make things sane again.

If you react in situations where remaining unreactive is ideal, you violate the Law of Least Effort and appear tryhard; yet, if you fail to react in situations where your reaction is sorely needed, you seem weak, fearful, and indecisive.

That makes things necessarily a bit trickier, because there isn’t a perfect one-size-fits-all response to every situation; sometimes it’s better to not react, other times better to react.

To know which one is called for, you must have a read on the specific situation... and you must be able not to bow to social pressure.

I had a tiresome dialogue on a long train ride yesterday where I found myself being sidetracked on irrelevancies in what originally seemed like it’d be an engaging conversation.

Throughout the course of this unfortunately lengthy conversation (it was a 6 hour train ride), this man repeatedly ignored points I’d made, talked over me, and argued with me over the most tangential points to our primary conversation subject.

The tragedy to me was that the conversation had started off with the possibility of being truly engrossing, only for my seatmate to repeatedly divert us to arguing over semantics like the definition of the word ‘training’ (which didn’t even matter; we could’ve used any other word if we had different definitions for what constitutes training and what doesn’t, but my interlocutor couldn’t let it go).

The funny thing was that repeatedly throughout this conversation, this fellow brought up wanting to trade numbers with me, to meet up with me again and bring me along to some free class he was attending, and other things of that nature; and he kept offering me food he had with him and even bought me a bottled water off the drink cart when it came by and I wasn’t present (and I didn’t have any small bills to pay him back for it). The entire time he kept telling me I could pay him back the next time I saw him, which only made me grate my teeth more.

I felt like a pretty girl being hounded by a really nice but really clueless and annoying guy. I kept hoping someone was going to come along and save me. Because it was a packed train ride, there wasn’t anywhere else I could escape to, either (though in retrospect I suppose I could’ve snuck off to the meal car; didn’t think of it). Eventually I was able to let this conversation die long enough for me to fall into a nap and be free.

It occurred to me that this man probably does this with everyone; he enters into these alienating conversations with people, tries to lecture them, ignores any indication that they may know as much or more about a subject than he does, and gets sidetracked on irrelevancies. And that can happen to anyone who’s reasonably educated and passionate about a subject from time to time; I’m sometimes (on rare occasions) guilty of this myself, too.

Yet, had this fellow known the value of talking less, instead of struggling so mightily to be heard and to be right, he wouldn’t have needed to resort to bribery and manipulation to try to coax me into meeting him.

He could’ve simply given me the chance to talk a little bit, and genuinely engaged with me instead.

This is the follow up to “Classroom Body Language and Other Casual Situations”.

Women don’t see the world logically; when it comes to body language they explicitly avoid logic and instead just “feel” things out. They generally don’t think “Oh it is okay that that guy chose a corner” or “Well he just wasn’t feeling social today”, they generally take things you do as if it relates to them somehow and end up thinking you don’t like girls or are “usually grumpy” or something.

So if you want to get good at body language in a confined space, like in a classroom, you will need to act as if women will never hear your rationalizations for acting passive.

In the absence of girls reading you logically, you need to pay attention to what you do:

• Positioning
• Social momentum and how it is affecting your mood
• How it might relate to her

Most guys just look for where to sit in a very logical way, but it is here at the start that their body language is set into motion to be bland, as they don’t care about what they are doing around women and lack appreciation for their environment and what their positioning communicates. Try to never just randomly pick a spot or let the crowd push you into a corner. It is okay to feel exposed; it will force you to stop playing around and think about your body language.

Great body language will allow you to sit anywhere openly.

Few people know this, but body language relies on social momentum, so never cut and run from exposure; never shroud your shoulders and turn away from everything. Small social interactions fuel body language, and this fuel is necessary to highlight how you feel about women to the women who look at you.

There’s little more frustrating than that guy demanding you prove yourself to him, or that girl challenging you to show her how badass you are.

It always feels uncomfortable and icky when people do this to you, but you may feel pressured to respond... or not feel like there are really any valid other options to do BUT prove yourself or look “disproved.”

And then, when you prove yourself? Either the other person dismisses your proof and tells you “Not good enough”, or you get the slow clap “I’m impressed” response that drives you nuts – either way this other person asserts his superiority.

For all you care, he could have commanded you to be a good monkey and dance, and you (unhappily) obliged.

Obviously, tap dancing on command isn’t the way to handle this one.

Instead, you must understand how to deal with it when it arises, and you must understand what prompts it in the first place.

Welcome back for more sexual ethics. In this post we won’t be analyzing what is right or wrong, but instead why things are the way they are.

As this website primarily discusses sexuality, relationships, and seduction, this post will cover why certain moral attitudes around these topics are the way they are. We will also try to understand why many religions and societies advocate rather asexual behavior.

In this post we will see that the reasons for why conventional (i.e., the common way of doing things) morals are dogmatic without good justification, and then we will discuss the real justification for those morals.

As a matter of fact, we might say that, conventionally speaking, having a lot of sex is immoral. We might ask the moralist why that is so and they might answer that “it just is” or something along the line of “It’s dirty; it’s important to have some self-respect.”

These are very circular and dogmatic arguments. This is the case for many other conventional moral principles and we must expect similar types of responses when we ask someone why things like polyamory, homosexuality, prostitution, and public sex are bad.

But we are still left with the question: why do people believe these things to be bad; why are people so stuck up and anti sex? Why are the conventional morals around sexuality so restrictive? The main reasons that you never hear of will be laid out in this post.

‘Respect’ is a thing we get a lot of questions on around here. Most regularly, how to command it. How do you make others respect you?

The easy answer is, you earn it. But that’s only half of the equation.

The other half is that you demand it.

Some will pay you respect you do not demand. But others will only respect you if you yank the respect out of their gullet with both hands.

And whenever someone has a problem with respect, it’s always because he’s lacking on one (or both) sides of the equation:

1. He isn’t demanding respect, or
2. He hasn’t earned it yet
   

In Part 3 of my 3-part series on compliance, I’ll be discussing how to say no to people who want compliance out of you – and when specifically to say it (as opposed to saying yes).

You can read Parts 1 and 2 of the series here:

1. How to Get Her to Say “Yes”
2. What If She Says No?
   

Turning down compliance is actually an especially dicey area for most. Even for experienced guys... even for men who are naturals socially... you will run into the odd situation here and there where you aren’t sure whether to say yes or no, and aren’t sure how to say no even if you probably should.

Tell me you’ve been here before: there’s a really cute girl, and you really dig her, yet the dynamic you have with her is just that you’re chasing her a little bit too much... yet, you sense that if you let up even a bit, she’s going to vanish off into the ether.

And then, out of the blue, she says: “Can you wait here a minute? I have to go make a phone call,” then turns to go leave.

Can you say no to this? Should you? What’s your play?

You can sense that letting her do this only worsens your position with her and moves you farther away from getting anywhere with her... but you just don’t know what else to do.