Pickup

By now you know I'm a big proponent of moving fast and playing to win. I consider these vital traits to succeeding with women in today's day and age, where we live in urban environments literally flooded with both millions of viable female options for you to end up with – and millions of viable male options for every woman you meet to end up with. Men who dally around get scraps. Or, quite often, nothing at all.

One of the main mentalities I deem absolutely necessary to nurture in yourself is "shoot first, ask questions later." Action over inaction. Staying constantly in motion, and ensuring that that constant motion is pointed always in the direction in which victory lies. Getting sidetracked in a seduction is, quite often, a kiss of death, so you must stay focused.

Women nearly universally display a social behavior with men they like that's often referred to as "testing." Testing is what women do when they're looking to see if a man is strong and congruent with himself; in other words, if he really is all the man he's presenting himself to be.

Asking a man to do something for her, or teasing him with sexual suggestions to see if he jumps at the opportunity or gets overexcited, or dropping hints with regards to her own promiscuity or relationship status to see if he gets defeated and walks away – all those are "tests," and there are many other varieties.

Testing often gets a bad rap with men. It gets called annoying, frustrating, or petty – but still, all but the absolute most innocent, trusting, inexperienced women – the ones who don't know men any better yet – do it. But why do women test men, and how do you act in testing situations? That's the subject of this post: what to do when women test you.

The other day I got told I was a very good flirt. And, I suppose, I am. Of course, I wasn't always a good flirt... well, perhaps I was always at least a little bit of a flirt.

What's it matter if you know how to flirt with a girl or not? In fact, it matters a good deal. Flirting is how you arouse a girl's interest and make her start imagining the two of you getting together. And once you've gotten her thinking about it – and gotten her thinking about it in a fun, suggestive way – you're a lot closer to taking it out of her and your imagination and into the real world.

In this post, we're going to focus on what most men do wrong when it comes to flirting with women, what the right mindsets are for a man who's a successful flirt, and what talented flirts do. So purse your lips and lower your eyelids a smidge; we're going to get flirty.

My girl was over and we were talking earlier about how difficult a time it is for a woman to find a quality guy she likes a lot. She spooled off a quick list of men she'd been on dates with who hadn't made the cut: there was the older doctor who lied about his age, and the guy she went to the movies with who had touched her arm and creeped her out. But the one who stood out the most to me was the one she described as her "good friend."

This was a guy who took her out to walk on the ice over a lake in town that had frozen over. There, the guy professed to her that he would satisfy all her needs. At the moment when he said that, she briefly asked herself, "Huh. Could I have sex with this guy?" Her answer was no, it'd be weird. He was her friend.

And then she said something that really stood out:

"I like him as a friend. We can talk about anything. I'm like his guy friend. And he's like my girlfriend."

I was just playing a computer game, this combination zombie / Sim City style game called Rebuild, where you try to expand your city while at the same time keep your defenses up to guard against sporadic zombie attacks that you can't predict and don't know when will strike. I am pretty swamped with work at the moment, and don't allow myself much leisure time aside from socializing or seeing friends or spending time with girls... playing that game an hour or two a day is one of the few things I do to unwind these days.

Anyway, at one point in the game I was faced with a decision: I'd taken some heavy losses, and I had a chance to make a critical expansion, but to take that chance, I was going to have to leave myself vulnerable to attack. I might be attacked and lose the game if I took that chance, or I might not be attacked and I'd make a much-needed step forward. At first I thought, "No, it's too dangerous – maybe I should just play it safe and progress slowly." But then I realized, at the rate I was going, with the losses I'd already suffered, playing it safe probably wasn't going to pan out in the end. It was either play to win, and maybe win, or maybe lose on the spot, or play it safe, and probably die a slow death instead.

Most men who've been studying the social arts a little while come to realize, either consciously or instinctually, that coming out and telling women things about themselves unasked is an inferior means of conversing than first being asked for things before telling them. People start to come to understand the laws of effort and investment intuitively, and they recognize that another person putting in effort to learn something about them is better than another person putting in no effort and learning something about them regardless.

Even then, though, this rule – a very important social rule – often flies under the radar of most men, and they continue seeking to build rapport with women (or even attempting to force rapport, you might say) by sharing as much free, unasked for information about themselves as they can.

I call this "trading information," and view it as one of the vilest, most heinous social crimes you can commit. It does two things that are positively detrimental to your efforts to be charming and engaging and delightful and seductive with women, and, after an example of what many guys do and you ought not to do, I'll explain both of those below. Then, I'm going to introduce a concept some of you may be familiar with but many are not: baiting, and how you as a conversationalist can use it to get women vastly more invested in you and your conversations with them.

A good, if somewhat disreputable, buddy of mine in Southern California who'd bedded a significant number of women he'd met primarily at dive bars once summed up his philosophy of getting girls to me like this: "Just get 'em drunk, bring 'em home, get 'em more drunk, and have sex!" Ah, the age-old combination of sex and alcohol.

People've been doing it that way since the Ancient Greeks were sporting togas and spears. Sex and alcohol have gone hand-in-hand in human society for a long, long time. Stands to good reason there ought to be some good reasons for it, then, too.

Everyone knows why the two make such good bedfellows: alcohol lowers inhibitions, and sex is something we tend to have a lot more when our inhibitions are in said lowered condition. Alcohol also serves as a social lubricant – liquid courage, if you will – making men more bold and women more willing. But it goes deeper than that – and if you truly want to master the seductive arts, you're going to need to be willing to loosen your grip on the bottle, too.