Investment

Have you ever noticed that in almost every relationship… sooner or later, but often right from the start or at least very early… one of the two partners is more emotionally involved than the other? And that it's invariably the other of the two who retains the most relationship control?

That one often seems to be more invested, more in love, more interested… that there always seems to be a certain lack of balance?

This phenomenon is what psychologists call a “Passion Trap”, and it has been explained in great detail in Dean C. Delis’s excellent book about the topic, The Passion Trap: Where is Your Relationship Going?, which I think everybody should read in high school… it is THAT important to understanding relationships.

But in the meantime, let me give you a primer… and some insights we “professional seducers” have come to, that psychologists haven’t even written about yet.

If you've been reading material on doing better with women for any length, you're probably very familiar with the need to screen women. For men starting out in improving their dating lives, this can be one of the strangest new elements to add - you're so used to trying to pass women's screens... and now you are going to screen them, instead?

For guys who've been around the block a few times, this isn't anything new, although you might still find yourself causing women to go into auto-rejection by screening too hard or on things the women you're talking to aren't able to pass your tests on.

Either way - whether you're a new guy who's just getting around to outfitting his screening arsenal, or you're a seasoned guy who'd like to find a few new ways to screen women you meet - this list of things to screen women on from my eBook How to Make Girls Chase: Every Tactic and Technique You Need to Get the Girl(s) of Your Dreams is designed to help you come up with a host of different (and interesting) subjects to explore... and screen... the women you meet on.

If you're keeping up on the latest in game openers, you're probably familiar with the now-canon advice to pay women a compliment when you approach them during the daytime… and, that actually works pretty well, sometimes.

I’ve met and hooked up with a lot of beautiful girls that way … a sincere compliment during the daytime is often unexpected, and women admire the courage it takes to pull it off.

Especially on a dead cold approach of a girl you’ve never met before – she will often be jealous. She might WISH she had that kind of courage, to be open enough to just meet strangers like that.

That said, there are a few serious disadvantages to this approach, which is why I’ve stopped doing it almost altogether.

Something that every nice guy has painfully experienced - one way or the other - is that when you don't challenge women, you also don't attract women. Challenge is a necessary, integral part of building and maintaining respect and desire for you in women.

But what is challenge? It's easy to understand why most guys get this wrong. It's hard to pin the concept of "being a challenge to women" down when you're not sure where the line is. What if you challenge her too much and lose her? And while this does happen - it's called auto-rejection, and it happens more than most men realize - if you're hitting women's no-challenge flags too often, you need to get that one fixed first before you start worrying too much about whether you're going too far.

Can't fix the problem of going too far if you usually don't go far enough in the first place... right?

You need to train yourself, if you don't do it already, to challenge girls.

If you've been reading this site a while, I'm sure you've seen me recommend again and again that you move girls to get them committed to the interaction with you.

You might have wondered exactly what that meant though, or exactly how to do it.

It's a surprisingly simple piece of advice - "move girls" - but it makes a huge difference in how your interactions go. In fact, it's hands down my favorite exercise to do with coaching clients. Typically we go out, work on a little basic opening, some initial conversation, and then, the meat - I tell a guy, "All right, next, I want you to start moving these girls."

I've seen this called "isolation" in some places, "extraction" in others. It's been given lots of longwinded technical explanations, like you need to move women in order to get them away from their friends, who'll interfere... or something like that.

This is not so. Friends don't make much of a difference. What DOES make a difference is getting girls to commit to talking with you - and following your lead.

And that's necessary for a couple of different reasons.

A reader writes in, on the topic of emotional validation:

“Hey there, been reading the site lately and I've noticed that one thing I haven't seen so far is a post about validation. Maybe you call it something different but I was talking to a female friend of mine and she brought something up that seemed similar to it.

I was telling her about how I and my pops were watching a Laker game and my mom kept bringing up how "she needs to get her work done." It was starting to irritate me because she would say it and then leave it up in the air.

After a while I barked back "well go do it then." I knew instinctively that wasn't the best thing to say but I really wanted her to quit with the empty statements lol!

So, after the game ended I talked to her about it and she was telling me how I could have said "I know you gotta get your work done but how about you relax with us and watch the game and then go start on the work afterwards?"

Now as soon as I heard her say that I immediately thought validation. I'm validating that thought or feeling by giving that response. While my response of "go do it" sounds like I'm rejecting her.

So I was wondering if you all could drop a post on validation. Once I realized this whole idea of validating a woman it gave me that "aha" moment, really started to put a lot of my failed interactions into a new light, you know? It also helped me to understand the whole chase framing, push-pull, etc. concepts because by validating her all of that stuff is much easier to pull off. Because she knows that you’re setting a frame but your pulling her along with you. Instead of making it seem like its her frame against yours like many other PUA’s seem to advocate.”

Our reader raises a good point here.

Validation is something I tend not to focus on much personally - it's something that fast becomes irrelevant when you're following the rule of thumb of always escalate and keep moving fast. But it's a real phenomenon, and it will affect your interactions with women - though, if you're doing things right, it should prove more a curiosity than a major distraction.

Here's what I mean.

It sounds like advice more characteristically given from one woman to another, but the warning to not be too easy to get is just as valid for men as it is for women.

Being too easy to get - and robbing women of the challenge of having to get you and net you for themselves - can seriously undermine your value and make it unnecessarily difficult to attract women back again.

Don't shoot yourself in the foot - use the examples from today's excerpt from my eBook How to Make Girls Chase: Every Tactic and Technique You Need to Get the Girl(s) of Your Dreams to figure out where the right line is to walk to get yourself having just the right amount of availability - and challenge.