Female Mind

A reader writes in:

Hi Chase,

Just a quick message to say I've learnt a lot from your insights and blog over the last year. I decided to improve myself after hitting an embarrassing rock bottom with a girl I had been chasing after for over a year and your website has helped me do just that. These days I know I can go out and acheive high success with very attractive women of my choosing.

The problem is, I have now reached a point where I would like a girlfriend and I currently have two 2nd dates and 3 first dates with potential girlfriends. I am at a point where its almost too easy to get girls highly interested even past the first date. You teach a lot about how to get girls interested but I wondered if you had any advice about how to let girls down easy without coming across like an asshole. I enjoy having a choice of women for the first time in my life (!) but I don't like the idea of just enjoying the 'sport' of it.

I know there's probably no easier thing to do than to just to pick the one I like the most and dump the others but I just thought I'd ask your thoughts anyway,

Ta,
E

No doubt, that can be a tough one: how do you let a girl down without being a bad guy or a total heartbreaker? It can make you feel like a pretty underhanded guy – maybe even like you were just leading her on – when you have to turn her down when you know she was hoping to be with you.

But, in fact, there is a right way to do it.

I've been getting called "gentle" and "a gentleman" quite a bit recently. Me, of all people! The man who prides himself on taking women as lovers within a few hours of meeting them, and who hardly ever goes on second dates because he either sleeps with a girl on the first date, or burns the house down trying.

Yet I am, according to more and more women I meet these days, a gentleman.

I've had an interesting and at times soap opera-y progression of events over the past week in which my girlfriend has contacted an ex-girlfriend of mine, whom she'd never met or spoken to, in order to, at first, vent about me and seek her guidance, and now to be friends with her. My ex-girlfriend and I have since reconciled, and my current girlfriend and my ex-girlfriend have been comparing notes on me: the good and the bad.

I have a big belly (I'm skinny by American standards, but... I'm not in America anymore).

My face gets red very easily.

I'm troublesome and not simple. Just when they think they have me figured out... they realize they were wrong.

And, I'm a gentleman. I have gentle eyes. I'm a gentle person.

That last one is no accident, mind you. Being a gentleman is something I've long aspired to be. I'm a big believer that a man can be fast, powerful, and incredibly seductive – and yet, still manage to be dashing, enchanting, and considerate.

James Bond is a rogue and a knave, and he shoots bad guys and beds women – a LOT of women – with speed and expertise.

But he's still a gentleman. And if you aren't – well, I think you should aim to be, too.

It used to be the way things always were in America: if a man and a woman went on a date, the man paid. No two ways about it.

It's now not quite as ubiquitous as it used to be, but it is still a very common mindset. Many women expect men to pay for the first date. Many men would even feel embarrassed to not pay for the first date. Of course they pay for dates! That's just how it's done, and anything else would be classless and rude.

It remains the status quo to a large extent in countries around the world, in fact: I've heard many Latin women gripe about how they'll never see a man again if he doesn't pay for the first date, and when I've asked Asian women if the Asian guys they see on dates pay for them, they respond with, "Of course!" Even the guys they claim they only like as friends and will never date pay for them.

Everywhere you go, men pay for women. A lot of hoopla was made in the States about "going Dutch," which meant splitting the bill, but even the fact that it had to be given a name made it seem like some sort of big, extraordinary event.

Men are still expected to pay for dates.

I intend to show you today, however, that not only is paying for women unnecessary – it actually hurts your odds of ending up with a girl! Bear with me if that seems to insult your sensibilities a bit – before you pass judgment, allow me to invite you to come along down this rabbit hole with me.

A friend of mine shot me an email the other day, and in one part of the email he asked me this:

"How do you respond to girls when they tell you they are models? I've been getting that a few times in my gaming career and still have no clue how to reply... should I go: "Hmmm, modelling? Why did you chose to work as a model when you could have chosen...?" or should I downplay it?"

Models, yeah.

That's just about every guy out there's fantasy: dating a model. They're everywhere we look, all around us: newspaper and magazine ads, television commercials, even in the movies. Models are, in many ways, the very picture of feminine beauty personified in nearly every culture around the world.

But how exactly do you get a date with a model?

The fact is, most guys, when they run into a girl they find out models, tend to panic a bit and freeze up. "Oh no," they think, "what do I do? What do I say?" Something tumbles out of their mouths, but isn't quite as smooth as what they'd hoped it would be, and they end up tripping over their own two feet talking to this beautiful girl with her prestigious career.

She leaves.

They sulk.

If this sounds at all familiar, well, don't worry, because it used to happen to me too. It doesn't anymore, and when I meet models these days they even tend to get rather excited about me. And helping you learn how to date models, too, is what I aim to do here today.

Recently while scanning the good old Internet I came across a number of posts where guys talk down on beautiful women as being "shallow" and "bitches" and wonder about how to get "real girls." This seemed a little jarring and I like to cut myself off from negative stuff whenever possible, so I navigated away from those guys' pages.

But the thought was in my head: what is a "real girl?" Because to be sure, everyone defines it a bit differently.

A guy who sports a few tattoos and works construction might mean "a girl with a few tattoos herself who likes alternative rock and WWE" when he says "real girl." A guy who was a bit of a nerd in school and is a computer programmer now, on the other hand, might mean "a girl who appreciates sarcasm, digs anime, and plays WOW" when he says "real girl."

So who's right? Well, in a way, they both are – and neither of them are. Because what determines whether a girl is "real" or not isn't whether she rocks tattoos, surfs the web, or even whether she gets her hair dyed and her nails done or not. What determines "realness" runs a little deeper, and if you want to know how to get real girls, you need to know first what "realness" really is.

A guy meets a girl he likes. He starts talking to her, and there's electricity in the air. Attraction. He can tell she likes him. A lot, even.

She tells him all kinds of things about herself, her eyes wide and filled with excitement. It feels as though there's a bubble around them, in which only they exist; the outside world falls away.

For a while, as time passes, the energy and enthusiasm only builds. It builds and builds, until it hits a peak; a crescendo. And then... it begins to fade.

The guy panics mentally; he can tell he's losing this girl, whom he felt so sure was his only minutes before. He works hard, trying to turn things around, to reignite the passion that was there. But alas, his efforts fail, and the fire dies.

He's fallen victim to a painful fact of life and love: attraction has an expiration date.

But what's more painful is, guys almost never realize this is why they failed. Usually they assume it was a value problem, or that they need to get better at maintaining attraction.

If only they knew the truth: they did just fine with attraction. It was, ultimately, that failure to act in a timely enough manner that led them to losing the girl.

If you're in college, or you ever went to college, you're familiar with a phenomenon that's known widely today as "hook up culture:" the Western tradition of getting together for quick flings and casual intimacy with your friends. The way it's supposed to work is, you go out and get drunk, and you wake up the next day with some girl you're friends with. The two of you smile and laugh about it and then go about your lives as if nothing had happened. Or, perhaps, you hold a late night study session, and then the night goes a little later than either of you expected, and you end up in one another's arms. And then, the next day, maybe it's a little awkward, but again, you smile and laugh about it and shrug it off and it's on to the next one. But there's a problem with this idea of hook up culture, and it's a problem that drives lots of men crazy pulling their hair out and throwing monkey wrenches into their own efforts to bring women into their lives. The problem is, hooking up with friends is that it doesn't quite work as advertised. In fact, more often than not, it doesn't work at all. But why?