Seduction

Probably by now you have your New Year’s resolutions all done up and set to go for 2011, and you’re charged up and (hopefully) already setting to work turning those resolutions into reality.

I’ve always been a little anti-New Year’s resolutions myself, but that mostly because I’m just kind of a humbug, contrarian kind of cat. When I stop and think about it, I often do set a number of goals at the very beginning of the year, which for all intents in purposes are, in fact, resolutions for the new year. So, I grudgingly accept that now I, despite my protestations otherwise, do in fact make New Year’s resolutions. And they do, in fact, help.

So if you’re a little on the lazy side, or a bit of a humbug like me, and you don’t usually do resolutions for the next year, I invite you to do things a little different this year and join me in setting a few goals for yourself in 2011.

I was sitting in a nightclub tonight, smoke and booze surrounding me, sipping on a Jack and Coke (or what passes for one in this country), and thinking about some past interactions and feeling vaguely annoyed. There was the girl on Saturday whose friend was pushing her to go home with me as hard as she could, but the girl was a little too shy and wanted to push that back. I didn’t push as hard as I could; I still have a decent chance with her – she’s set to come cook dinner for me later this week – but my chances would’ve been better had I pushed a bit harder and taken her home that night. She liked me enough, but rather than close it out when I had it I let it slip through my fingers. Then there was the girl I brought home Friday night but who stayed tense and I didn’t push anything with since I couldn’t get her comfortable. She wants to see me again too, but my chances in the future are far lower than they were that night she was sitting in my apartment.

This is one of those things that’s as effective in opening as it is in closing, and it’s useful throughout the course of an interaction. Pulling on a woman’s arm or shoulders or waist (or, if you’re in bed or on the sofa, her legs or feet) and dragging her into you is one of those very fun, very dominant, very sexual things a man can do to a woman (or a woman can do to a man!) that take things and spike the level of excitement and intrigue very quickly.

The reasons it works so well are basically that:

• Only really confident men do this
• Only really dominant, sexual men do this
• It shakes a woman out of autopilot and brings her back into there here-and-now

Autopilot I just realized I haven’t written about on here yet; so let’s slate that as something to target in the near future. But for now, suffice it to say you don’t want women floating through their interactions with you without putting any mental footwork in. You want them making effort – albeit easy, natural effort – to be with you.

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.

For a long time, I subscribed to the notion that to get a girl, you had to meet her at her energy level, plus a little bit more. Too much more, and she’d think you were crazy; too much less, and you’d be a downer.

This meant, of course, that to get a girl in full-on party mode, going wild, talking excitedly, throwing her hands in the air, laughing like a woman possessed, dancing with reckless abandon on the dance floor, and just generally being young and carefree, you’d have to go in ever wilder and crazier than she was.

So I tried that for a while – being the wild, crazy party guy – and it got me a lot of positive reactions out of girls. But it didn’t get me girls. We’d dance, and party, and have excited conversation, but at the end of the night I’d still go home alone. All the while, I was going mad trying to figure out how to transition from opening women high energy to bringing them down to a lower energy vibe more conducive to seduction. I could do wild; I could do sexy; but I couldn’t seem to put the two of them together and get party girls.

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.

Yesterday on my way home, the bus I was riding on came to a stop with lots of young people – in particular, lots of young college age-looking women. My interest, needless to say, was piqued. As I sat in my seat, I watched everyone board the bus out of the corner of my eye… and then, I caught sight of a cute girl dressed very fashionably coming down the aisle. Ooh.

Now, when you’re already settled in somewhere, there aren’t a whole lot of ways you can get a woman to join you proactively. You might call out to her, of course – but this is chasing pretty hard and can hurt your chances, and you’ve probably got to be feeling rather bold to do it. If you are, and you want to try it, go for it; I wasn’t yesterday, but I still wanted that cute girl to take a seat next to me.

So I pulled out my trusty ol’ come hither eyes.