Socializing

In the piece on Dale Carnegie’s advice, a commenter asked about dealing with power struggles:

“Hey Chase this is a great article. Could you do an article about how to handle power struggles in friendships? I find it really has to do with investment. For example, my friend wants me to meet him somewhere, but I want him to meet me. Its like five minutes away, but its a power struggle thing. I get really annoyed when people do this because I’d like to have friends who don’t try to make things a competition like this. But I also have learned from this site that everyone is like this. Can you help me out?”

In the end, power struggles are always about the same thing, whether they’re in your romantic or sexual relationships, or your platonic ones – and I’ll cover all of these and everything else in the scope of this article.

There’s little more frustrating than having to deal with the relationship equivalent of guerilla warfare, but this is exactly what power struggles are – someone using frame control attempts, passive aggression, moral superiority and other forms of social subterfuge to undermine your position and climb the social ladder to a position above you in the hierarchy.

Not fun at all... and frequently quite draining.

So let’s talk about how power struggles come about, and what you can do once you realize you’re in one.

I’ve noticed as I’ve reviewed our discussion boards that lots of our posters are much more comfortable with meeting girls during the daytime, and find bars, nightclubs, and parties somewhat alien environments (although to be fair, there are also plenty of guys who are far more nighttime-oriented there as well).

When I stopped and thought about this, one of the things I realized was that when I first started hitting nightclubs, they were a pretty intimidating environment to experience:

• The loud, pounding, deafening music
• The big, imposing bouncers and other club patrons
• The flashy, intimidating-looking women
• The specter of approaching a girl only to meet her boyfriend’s fist
• The feeling that everyone else there belonged a lot more than you did
• The self-consciousness of knowing all these party people would see you get rejected if things didn’t go perfectly with a girl you went up to
  

Especially when you’re rolling solo, like I was most of the time early on, you feel like you stick out like a sore thumb, and make for an easy target for anyone looking for a fight and look like someone to be avoided for anyone trying to have a good time.

Everyone there who’s having fun – the people you want to be around... well, they don’t need you. You don’t even know how to break into the same category as them.

So this article’s going to serve as companion piece to my article on picking up girls in bars and clubs and your primer on how to be social: the 6 secrets every social man figures out sooner or later about how to work a venue, how to get comfortable in an intimidating environment like this, and how to set yourself up for more social (and sexual) success than you can shake a billy club at.

A few weeks back, I asked newsletter subscribers who’d been using Girls Chase material to send in details about their journeys doing so, that I might start building some case studies to use in some upcoming offerings and marketing material. I’ve been working my way through all these case studies – it’s been pretty intensive work – but it’s been interesting and reading so many success stories is heartening.

One that I just finished responding to was from a reader in Mumbai, India, in his late twenties and originally from Delhi. He’d been attending a salsa class in Mumbai, and had his sights set on a beautiful young female college student in the class, but had been blocked by her close friend who wanted him instead (but who wasn’t as cute).

So, rather than pursue a girl whose friend wanted him, which was going to be dicey, he followed the advice of a buddy of his and slept with a sexy MILF in the class instead – who rapidly became addicted to sleeping with him, and who then, in order to scare off some of the competition for his flirtations, let it slip to the other women in the class that he was a playboy and they should all “be careful” if they didn’t want to get their hearts broken. As it turned out, this was a great play by her to limit his options with the other girls there and keep him for herself.

Because while our reader figured at first this would be good for him – after all, preselection is the greatest aphrodisiac – the opposite happened, and the college girls and some others started cooling off toward him, gossiping about how he could “sleep with her.”

He ended up throwing the towel in on the college girl he liked, and leaving that class (and the MILF... though he left the option open to her to sleep with him again, if she’d get her friend, a former Miss India contestant, to double up on him together with her – no word on whether that’s going down just yet) to go seek greener pastures elsewhere. It was too bad it didn’t work out, he said, but it was a good experience regardless.

What got him in the end here though was the gossiping of the woman he was sleeping with, or her jealousy – it was the social rank of her compared to the other girls in class.

One of the things that’s bizarre for me to read among all many of the comments, emails, and forum posts from new guys just discovering Girls Chase or who’ve mostly just been reading occasionally but not putting into practice is the prevalence of the “this girl or this group or this environment is TREMENDOUSLY important and I can’t mess it up” mentality.

It’s been ages since I’ve had a mentality like that... but I can relate. I felt that way often in high school, and at times after in university. Once I dialed down my involvement with social circles and began approaching women, that feeling went away and never came back.

I was free.

At the same time, I led a more rewarding social life than just about anyone I knew – my hands full with pretty girls, and all the cool / admirable / successful male friends I could want.

Why would anybody leave themselves in such restrictive conditions that they felt like achieving one specific outcome with one tiny group of people was life or death?

We discussed this re: girls a guy might be obsessing over in “Can’t Stop Thinking About Her? Here’s Why You Need to Meet More Girls”... but it goes deeper than this, too; both with women, and with freedom in general.

We only have as much freedom as we allow ourselves, you see.

Since the dawn of time, men have made the fatal mistake of taking the words of women at face value. I can’t blame our kind, as we are logical beings who say what we mean and mean what we say.

But women…women are masters of subtlety. Subtlety and subtext are their hallmarks. And until you become well-versed in the language of the female, you can easily find yourself dumbfounded and in a storm of fury.

No treacherous territory should be treaded without a map. And no reasonable man should allow himself to be saddened, deluded, or maddened by his inability to understand what a girl actually means.

So today I’m going to lay out such a road map. I’m going to outline the common phrases you’ll hear from women in various contexts and what they really mean. I hope this will prevent you from being confused, frustrated, dumbfounded, or from having to ask yourself: what does she mean?

A little while back, when I was in my early 20s, I first read Dale Carnegie’s perennial bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence People. Many of the approaches described within it were things I knew, or affirmed what I felt, but sometimes the best kind of advice is this way; you think you’re doing things right, and then someone far more experienced than you comes along and says, “Yep, you’ve got it. In fact, take what you’re doing now and do it more.”

Because it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve read it, most of its lessons have faded from my mind, and all I remember about it was one key lesson from it. However, that lesson has influenced how I’ve dealt with people in such a profound way that I don’t think I’ll ever forget it no matter how much time passes.

[edit: was rolling Napoleon Hill’s Laws of Success up as one of Carnegie’s works... forgive the brain fart]

Yet, pound-for-pound, the key takeaway from Win Friends and Influence People for me has been one of the best takeaways from any book I’ve yet read period.

Before I tell you what that is, let me tell you what I’ve noticed about how most people communicate with one another.

We’ve talked about the friend zone on Girls Chase before: why it’s bad, what it looks like, and how to get out of it.

But you’ve asked for more.

You’ve asked for clear signs you can look for that are undeniable proof you’ve careened off the Road to Sexytimes and into the Bog of Asexuality. Irrefutable sign posts that the good times of dreaming about lovingly gazing into one another’s eyes are long behind you, and you now exist solely to stroke her ego as proof that she is so charming, so wonderful, and so hypnotically mesmerizing that great guys like you will just hang around in awe of her... all while she samples her fill of sexy bad boys.

Well, never fear. While the greatest danger of the friend zone is your own denial, all the rest we will solve with this enlightening post.

So, provided you can handle the healthy dose of cognitive dissonance you’ll receive from discovering that the girl you were so certain you were just one more funny text message away from talking onto your johnston really doesn’t think of you “that way" and probably never will, let’s dive in...

... and arm you with the 14 Terrible Signs You’re Deep in the Friend Zone.