Female Mind

Going to venture into morally questionable territory here, so bear with me. Even if you don’t agree with my decision to get intimate anyway with a girl who loved her boyfriend (though she clearly did quite a lot to put herself in the position to get together with me), I still think the topic we’re going to discuss will be well worth your time, so do read on.

Last night I met a girl for the first time through a social network I’m a part of who was visiting from Shanghai. She was a cute 25 year-old socialite and event manager who was in town to organize a big event at the Water Cube and seemed eager to meet up with me. Good so far.

We met up and grabbed some food and a drink each and talked about the usual stuff: life, goals, dreams, et cetera. Then she mentioned that she would never trust Italian men again, and that Italian men lied, and I was curious, so asked her more.

Just walked out the second girl I slept with in a 12-hour period. Oh my, going to need to get a good night’s sleep tonight… and I’m all out of bed sheets.

So I slept with a new girl yesterday who continues this streak I’ve been on of young and inexperienced girls. She’s the second new girl in less than a week to tell me I’m only her second lover, in fact. This is a girl I’d met a few months earlier at a dinner related to some work I was doing at the time. We’d spoken a few times since, and yesterday we had our first date. She spent the night with me, and this morning told me she loved me.

She asked me if I loved her back; I looked at her and gave her a warm smile. “You don’t love me,” she said.

“You don’t love me either,” I told her. “We just got together yesterday!”

“But I loved you the moment I saw you,” she said. “I walked into the restaurant and I saw you, and you smiled at me, and I said, ‘Oh God, I’m in love.’ Didn’t you feel it? Why did you smile at me that way?”

Women are subtle in how they show interest. Well, by male standards, anyway. Even when women think they are blatantly obvious, they’re quite often being very subtle by male standards.

Learning to tell how girls show interest is a very valuable skill for a man, because it will allow him to operate with greater assurance he’s making the right move at the right time, and will also allow him to pick up the pace when a woman signals she is ready.

The last couple of girls I slept with surprised me a little at how quickly they were ready to get together. They gave me some hints that probably would’ve seemed fairly subtle; a friend of mine remarked that one of the girls I took home and bedded rather quickly quite recently hadn’t even seemed to be terribly interested in me, and that it just looked like we were having a good conversation. Being able to read the signals they gave me was the main reason I moved as quickly with them as I did.

Today I found myself reading an article on the Washington Post’s website titled “Date Lab: A Matchmaking Year in Review”. It was all about these blind dates that the newspaper had sent people on throughout the year. I clicked through and read about each of the dates discussed, and paid attention to why the dates that didn’t pan out didn’t. For every single one of them, it came down to the same exact story as what I used to read when things didn’t work out in the monthly Pacific Beach magazine in Pacific Beach, San Diego, where they’d also have a blind date they sent a pair of readers out on each month.

I’ve come to the conclusion, based on my own experiences, that of friends, and of all these blind dates I’ve read about, that dating doesn’t work out the majority of the time because the guy doesn’t measure up. If you read about the blind dates that don’t work out in that Washington Post article, you’ll notice a similar thread through all of them: the guy says When I saw her, I definitely was physically attracted to her, and the girl says When I saw him, I instantly knew he was not my type.

Why is this so consistently the case?

Ah, one of my favorites – the Shy Excited Girl. She’s the one who acts demure and conservative, but she’s bursting at the seams with excitement and exuberance underneath (hopefully for you, although quite often just in general about life). I love these kinds of women personally because they have a kind of innocent enthusiasm about life that’s just contagious, and they tend to be very self-improvement oriented, which means that as you continue to grow and change and evolve, they’re the most likely of any woman out there to keep pace.

These girls are different from regular shy, quiet girls, and from wild party girls. They’re not soft on the inside like regular shy, quiet girls are; nor are they operating with reckless abandon on the outside like wild party girls are. Instead, Shy Excited Girls are full of life, energy, and curiosity, but they modulate that on the outside with reserve and practiced calm. They’re the girls who were filled with boyish energy when they were young, but society pushed back against them and they learned to control themselves and appear more “ladylike” on the outside. But in reality, they’re tigresses.

Shy Excited Girls will often seem quiet and reserved, but you can typically tell by their strong eye contact and decisiveness (as well as their tendency to get excited about all manner of things, laugh a lot, and generally be quite free) that they know what they want, and they know what they don’t want, and they’re going to get what they want and have nothing to do with what they don’t want. These women have the most raw, natural confidence of any kind of woman, and refreshingly don’t really care all that much what other people think. They do what they want.

About 3 ½ years ago in Washington, D.C., I was getting frustrated because I was finding this consistent pattern of how I’d be telling girls all these amazing, fascinating things about myself, and they’d act bored or unimpressed and things would go nowhere and I’d lose them. This kept happening, and anytime I see something happen again and again, I make the problem a priority to focus on and iron out, so I decided to try what at the time seemed like a radical strategy and one I didn’t really even think would work: I’d focus on telling women as little as possible about myself and just let them talk about themselves.

My first time doing this was on a date with a 21 year old fashion model from Texas who’d just moved to town. I’d met her very briefly on the subway a few nights before, and she knew nothing about me other than my name and that I lived in town, and had only given me her email address. I put together a rather elaborate process to get her on a date despite these facts, which perhaps I’ll go into in another post. She was unsure about me, and wanted to meet for coffee before heading to the comedy show I’d wanted to take her to go see, just to make sure I wasn’t a weirdo and that she liked me.

We sat at a Starbucks for about forty-five minutes, with her talking about herself, her friends, relationship problems her friends were having, and all manner of things, and me simply showing interest and doing some active listening, and saying nothing about myself and her asking me nothing about myself. When it got close to the time for the comedy show, I asked her if she wanted to go, and she replied with an enthusiastic “yes!” During the comedy show, I cracked a few jokes and got physically very close with her, and afterward I invited her home for a nightcap. We went straight home to my place and slept together. She later told me that she didn’t date much and never had hook-ups or one-night stands.

One of the habits women have that can be frightfully frustrating for men is asking them to give reasons on the most difficult of subjects. You know, when a man says, “Hey, let’s go do this,” or, “Personally, I like XYZ better,” and the woman looks at him quizzically and says, “Why?”

Until you get your reasons down, this can be one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t scenarios.

Consider the following scenario and a couple of different possible responses: a man meets a woman at a bar and invites her home with him. She asks him why. A few of the more common responses:

Man is caught off-guard:
“Well, um, because I think it would be fun for us to hang out and stuff.”
Woman’s reaction? She’s probably not going with him.

Man is straightforwardly honest:
“Because I want to get together with you.”
Woman’s reaction? She’s also probably not going with him.

Man is evasive:
“Come with me and you’ll see.”
Woman’s reaction? She’ll insist on him telling her why, then – probably, not going with him.