Emotions

Experiences shape every moment of your life. From the moment you are born, you adjust to things based on everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve done.

Such an important part of our lives – the way we interpret our surroundings – is not so well understood.

Hardly any attention is focused on figuring out how to define our realities, as such vexing questions have been asked by philosophers for years, only resulting in deeper and deeper riddles.

Understanding basic reality doesn’t have to be a difficult problem if you accept that you do, in fact, encounter experiences daily.

And, when you encounter these experiences, regardless of their origin, you understand that these experiences shape your entire reality, because they are the only tangible, measurable entity that you encounter on a daily basis.

If you believe that experiences shape and dictate your life, it makes sense that gaining knowledge about how this process works will further enhance your reality. In order to uncover the treasures that lay beneath, you must first break them down into simple, digestible components.

One of the things that’s bizarre for me to read among all many of the comments, emails, and forum posts from new guys just discovering Girls Chase or who’ve mostly just been reading occasionally but not putting into practice is the prevalence of the “this girl or this group or this environment is TREMENDOUSLY important and I can’t mess it up” mentality.

It’s been ages since I’ve had a mentality like that... but I can relate. I felt that way often in high school, and at times after in university. Once I dialed down my involvement with social circles and began approaching women, that feeling went away and never came back.

I was free.

At the same time, I led a more rewarding social life than just about anyone I knew – my hands full with pretty girls, and all the cool / admirable / successful male friends I could want.

Why would anybody leave themselves in such restrictive conditions that they felt like achieving one specific outcome with one tiny group of people was life or death?

We discussed this re: girls a guy might be obsessing over in “Can’t Stop Thinking About Her? Here’s Why You Need to Meet More Girls”... but it goes deeper than this, too; both with women, and with freedom in general.

We only have as much freedom as we allow ourselves, you see.

Since the dawn of time, men have made the fatal mistake of taking the words of women at face value. I can’t blame our kind, as we are logical beings who say what we mean and mean what we say.

But women…women are masters of subtlety. Subtlety and subtext are their hallmarks. And until you become well-versed in the language of the female, you can easily find yourself dumbfounded and in a storm of fury.

No treacherous territory should be treaded without a map. And no reasonable man should allow himself to be saddened, deluded, or maddened by his inability to understand what a girl actually means.

So today I’m going to lay out such a road map. I’m going to outline the common phrases you’ll hear from women in various contexts and what they really mean. I hope this will prevent you from being confused, frustrated, dumbfounded, or from having to ask yourself: what does she mean?

An assumption that a lot of men make when they first get into seduction is that they need to be something more than just a man to have sex with. They assess that women have nearly unlimited options for men to sleep with, and thus that they need to build more value and hold something “special” so women will want them and be attracted to them.

However, when men feel like they have nothing to offer a woman because she already has hundreds of other men clamoring to have sex with her, seduction becomes very difficult. Those men have nearly no sense of purpose guiding them towards becoming better with women, because in the end they just feel like they’re pulling sleight of hand to have sex with her.

This, in essence, is a very idealistic scenario, where inexperienced men assume that women just want sex and have so many options for it that any chance of them getting into the system is futile. So they try to build value in other ways – by being a friend or provider in lieu of the commonality of sex.

However, seduction is a venereal experience. How one experiences sex determines its value. When men have been removed from this experience, it becomes very easy for them to forget that sex is about much more than the physical act. It’s about the experience that sex entails that brings about great value to a man who is able to give the best of experiences.

Commenting on “What to Do When a Girl Won’t Go Home with You”, Blogster asks about what women’s responsibilities are in the mating game and where a man must “draw the line” when it comes to trying to make a girl his:

“Do take your point on this one. However, at what point does all the game advice for men cross into the territory of a woman’s jurisdiction?

With each piece of advice about how to handle situations and tighten your game, it sees more and more of the woman’s responsibility being transferred over to men.

One of the admirable traits of men generally is that we are self-motivated and proactive and take charge. We look for our own mistakes and correct. However I feel the manosphere and valuable dating advice sources such as girlschase makes the mistake of swinging too far with the attitude of ‘if it didn’t go well, you the man did something wrong, or should of done something better’. Accountability is good, assuming complete agency is ridiculous and unrealistic, as it assumes the man has the capacity to control all relevant circumstances affecting a pickup and that by improving and fine tuning technique results will come.

The implications for this are obvious – women are just automatons and have no individual preference, attraction will occur reasonably successfully if you master the right techniques smoothly and ultimately, that women have no agency as adults.

It also plays into and reinforces current societies frame regarding relationships – that the man must do all the work and its the man’s fault if something goes wrong or the seduction doesn’t occur.

Increasingly also I see double standards in advice being doled out. For example, a recent post spoke about how to deal with judgement. It says its crucial not to judge women, yet women are by far the more judgemental sex and constantly do so on a broader range of factors.

A man is expected to skilfully disarm a woman’s judgements, but a woman is not expected too because otherwise she ‘won’t open up’. Does it occur to you that maybe men don’t open up because of female judgement and thus lose out? Yet the onus seems always on the man. Put it this way, if your friend was constantly dodging responsibility and being unnecessarily judgemental would you pander to him?

A man is expected to overcome his approach anxiety by himself. Is there any advice anywhere that says about how women should ‘help the man through his approach anxiety’? Of course not, yet there is plenty of expectation that a man should smooth and ease the women in the last moments before seduction.

In this instance, I feel it pushes the ‘responsibility balance’ of game even further towards the man. Soon all the woman will have to do is show up!”

This comment no doubt reflects a lot of men’s frustrations over the travails of mating – I’ve heard them the world over, in any number of different cultures, and if you read back through history you can read of men from all ages complaining of the same things.

So what are women’s responsibilities in dating and mating? Do they serve as just passive recipients of men’s advances? And if at first you don’t succeed – how many times should you really try and try again?

A reader writes in:

“Hey Girls Chase, I'm finding these articles to be quite eye opening. You guys seem to really get what's happening as opposed to other people out there who try to help guys with this stuff.

I think I'll finally be able to put myself together for a social life with your guidance.

I have a question. I haven't left my family's house, and I'm 27 years old. I have spent a long time in my life struggling with my own self-image and trying to figure out what it takes to have a life where I'm respecting myself. I said I'd be brief. So I'll just get right to it.

Is it possible for me to be attractive to women and get a social life? I'm not looking for sympathy. I just want to know how I should feel about my circumstances. I've always been shunned in school growing up and don't really have a deep positive impression of human beings. I've only ever had one girlfriend and long story short she was ugly and entitled. I know how to be civil and polite. I know how to feel happy, I can empathize with other people, but I don't know how to make people want to be a part of my life. Thankfully, there's more to me than this sob story.

I've been working out and reading a lot of this type of stuff and it's been helping me to be better noticed and better treated by members of the opposite sex. I'm determined to change my life but the girls are looking at me NOW. I'm about more than just “nothing”. Isn't there a way I can dive into sex and relationships?

Does me currently living with my mother and father automatically disqualify me from using the stuff I learn on your website on women and possibly experience the benefits? I've seen some SEXY women eyeing me and drawing close and the battle in my head is always the same. “You don't know what to tell her.” So I say to myself, “I'll learn” but then my head pull out the ol' “mama's boy still lives with his mama and daddy”.

Does it matter? If it does, how much does it matter? I have a feeling I'll find the answer to that soon enough as I read. I tried looking on your site for an article about this and the search turned up empty. So why not tell me what you think? If I still live with my parents will it get in the way of hooking up with or starting something regular with a girl I'd really like?

Thanks for your help

Jonathan”

Sounds very familiar.

This is something that I ran into quite often in the past. I thought it’d always be a good idea to put off doing things until later. I’d learn how to get better with women later on. I’d wait until I finally got to the point where I felt “sexy” enough to start approaching women. I’d put off improving my fundamentals so that I could fix something else in my life.

Eventually, I ended up becoming a huge procrastinator, and only ended up working on those things when I finally got so fed up with myself that I had to do something to dull the pain of failure.

It all started with excuses popping into my head, saying that I’d be better off doing things later. But, like most things that I put off until later, they just never got done. I never became better at seduction simply by thinking to myself, “I’ll do it later”. I only got better when I took action.

A little while back, when I was in my early 20s, I first read Dale Carnegie’s perennial bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People. Many of the approaches described within it were things I knew, or affirmed what I felt, but sometimes the best kind of advice is this way; you think you’re doing things right, and then someone far more experienced than you comes along and says, “Yep, you’ve got it. In fact, take what you’re doing now and do it more.”

Because it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve read it, most of its lessons have faded from my mind, and all I remember about it was one key lesson from it. However, that lesson has influenced how I’ve dealt with people in such a profound way that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it no matter how much time passes.

[edit: was rolling Napoleon Hill’s Laws of Success up as one of Carnegie’s works... forgive the brain fart]

Yet, pound-for-pound, the key takeaway from Win Friends and Influence People for me has been one of the best takeaways from any book I’ve yet read period.

Before I tell you what that is, let me tell you what I’ve noticed about how most people communicate with one another.