Fundamentals

As a boy, I decided I wanted to learn how to be a man who inspired others to gather around him. I wanted to become a magnet for people. I don't know why I wanted this; it's just something I've always had, something deep in my DNA. I have family members who are actors, singers, and entrepreneurs; at least one of my ancestors was a privateer (or, more commonly, a pirate), a few hundred years back.

Even as recently as my great-grandfather, I'm told that my grandmother was first introduced to her future father-in-law when my grandfather brought her to his father's estate in Europe, led her up a large grand staircase, and cast open the doors to his bedroom, revealing an old man reposed in his bed with two young women, one on either arm. I come from a long line of different, eccentric individuals who have had little taste for playing by the rules.

Yet, I still faced an uphill climb as I developed. It might seem that being a man is passé in today's world of tender, sensitive males and assertive, upwardly mobile females. TV and the movies lionize the shy, unconfident man; powerful men routinely get painted the villains, or used as unintelligent plot devices eventually triumphed over by strong women and underdog men. Society tells you it's men's feelings that are most important, and achievement is of secondary importance; so long as you're happy, that's all that really matters.

Because of all this, we now celebrate the ordinary, and frown upon the exceptional. It's as though the exceptional threaten ordinary individuals' contentedness in their own ordinariness, and so must be discouraged from pursuing the exceptionalism that would seem so disruptive to those around them.

Well, if you want to know how to be a man women chase and pursue, you're going to have to accept that you're going to get a lot of push back from people, and you're going to have to confront the beliefs you've been instilled with since a child. You'll have to pull the wool from your eyes, so to speak.

But as you do, you'll find the world comes to look a more and more beautiful place, the more you see it for what it really is. Today, I want to help you pull that wool down and see the world a bit more for what it is, and arm you with a few steps to start taking right now to set yourself on the road to becoming the kind of man you've always dreamed you could be.

And in order to accomplish all this, I'm going to give you a set of maxims to grow by.

Ever heard of the term "social pressure" before? Ever stopped and considered how you're using it with the women you meet?

Well, here's a scary thought: what if I told you you were doing something with women right now that was completely wrong?

Like, so wrong it was costing you more girls than you'll ever possibly know?

In fact, what I'm going to do today is I'm really, honest to God, no two ways about it going to tell you about something that I'm confident 99.9% of guys reading this post today haven't even realized they're doing.

That something has to do with social pressure, and it's one you don't really hear about ever in pick up or the social arts. Why? Well, because it's incredibly subtle... and I think guys just aren't fully consciously aware of it.

Take a look at the image above and to the right: how do you think the guy feels with that girl? Think he feels like he needs to pursue her... to get her interested again... to win her back? That's her putting social pressure in action -- and it goes both ways. But no one talks about it.

Hence, this post; created so that I can tell you why social pressure is so incredibly, unbelievably, unavoidably important and pervasive in just about all of your interactions with women (men, too), and how precisely you can start using it to your advantage -- instead of getting burned by it, like most guys do. Rather than get burned, you can learn to be a social pressure pro - and apply and alleviate it like only the most socially skilled socialites and the most beautiful, sought-after men and women can.

Walking back from the gym this afternoon, under the hot summer sun, I was a bit of a mess. My shirt was drenched in sweat; my arms were stiff and wooden; my hair was a little messy; and I was still breathing a little heavy.

I noticed a girl walking toward me, dressed in rather fancy garb, and as she saw me, she pulled her face into a mildly contorted look that spoke somewhat of disgust. But, at the same time, she also couldn't seem to take her eyes off of me, and I noticed those eyes scanning me up and down; she brushed her hair back, and as she walked toward me, she ever so slightly veered toward me.

I've met lots of girls like this before. Girls that, on first glance, might appear to be completely put off by you. But if you read between the lines, their more subtle actions tell a different story. In fact, I've taken some of these women who gazed upon me with what looked like disgust as lovers, oftentimes rather quickly.

What I want to get across here is, how to tell if a girl likes you -- or not -- isn't always as cut and dry a case as you might think.

Sometimes it can even be the opposite of what you initially thought -- and that holds for both the girls you think like you, and the girls you think don't.

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.

When I first decided to start tackling women and dating as a skill set to methodically improve at the end of 2004, I went into it with three distinct aims:

• Be a seductive, charming bad boy,
• Constantly test the limits and push to improve, and
• Make women feel special.

I didn't know exactly what I was doing or how my learning curve would look, but I trusted that as I chipped away at learning the ability to do better with women, I would indeed get it down, as I had a diverse array of other skills.

It wasn't until a year later that I found the pick up community. Many parts of it excited me; I couldn't believe there was an entire group of men who'd worked to develop this same skill set too, some much further along than myself. But there was one part that mystified me:

These guys didn't seem to know how to make a girl feel special.

So much of their stuff revolved around spitting out scripted lines and "canned routines" at girls, which I tried, briefly, but tossed aside after only a few weeks. It didn't feel genuine at all, and it wasn't how I wanted my interactions with women to be.

They had lots of great advice, to be sure; studying the findings of these guys who'd already been down the path I'd set myself out on was immensely helpful. But in that one department -- in making girls feel special -- I was pretty sure I had something they didn't.

Women do some strange, confusing things.

Things like getting rude and angry with men who are treating them as well as they possibly can. Things like telling a man they're not wearing any underwear... and then walking away when he gets too excited. Things like saying "no" when they mean "yes," and "yes" when they mean "no."

So you'll be forgiven for thinking it must be impossible understanding women.

And to top it all off, most women don't even understand themselves. They can explain some of the simpler things they do, but if you start asking them why they (or other women) do the more complicated things they do, you get answers that are full of holes. They sound good on an pure emotional level, but take a moment to analyze the logic and you'll realize it doesn't hold water.

Women really honestly don't know why they do what they do. So how could you possibly know? But, in fact, learning to understand women actually isn't an impossible task. It's a lot easier than you might think, in fact... so long as you understand a few little things, first.

If you're like me and you come from a background of being low attainability with girls -- teasing them a little too hard, seeming a little too aloof, causing them to clam up and get cold and snippy and dismissive -- or if you started off as a nice guy and ended up swinging to the opposite extreme, you'd probably be inclined to thinking screening and qualifying is the best thing since sliced bread. I know I sure was.

Screening and qualifying is an effective way of finding out if a girl meets your standards. If you're just starting out with women, of course, most of those "standards" are arbitrary standards you're putting up for the sake of seeming like you're being picky; but as you accumulate more success with women, you really do become a lot pickier.

So how do you find out if a girl's your kind of girl? Well, you screen her and, when she passes your screens, you qualify her. At least, that's the standard advice.

What I've realized lately though is that stand-alone screening and qualifying -- even at its acme, its highest levels -- it's still a technique best suited to beginners and early intermediates.

Why? Because, one, screening and qualifying as a stand-alone technique is clumsy. It's unnatural, and it feels contrived. And in fact, as you start getting better, there's something a lot more natural you can use in this approach's place.