Socializing

One piece of guidance I often give to guys looking to improve with women is to start doing active listening in order to better listen to women and build great connections with them fast. It's simple, straightforward advice that's easy to start implementing right away -- or at least, that was what I'd been thinking.

A reader writes in reminding me of a realization I had years ago but since forgot about the right way to do active listening:

“Wow man just had a great convo with my mom of all people about how to handle women. We talked a lot about things I already knew but it gave me a fresh perspective. But the one thing she told me about was "paraphrasing what she said"

She told me that a lot of guys like "reiterate" what a woman says. For example if I was talking to a woman and she told me a story about jogging and how it makes her feel great. Reiterating would be me saying "Hmmm so what you're really saying is you feel great because of this...." Then the woman tells me "NO I'm feeling great because of what I just said! Your not listening to me!"

Now that same situation as a paraphrase would go "so let me see if I understand you, your saying you feel great because of this..." then she says "Yes exactly I was feeling great because growing up my mom..."

Now at that point I've got her opening up because she's feeling understoood. And sorry for the vocab lesson I"m sure you already knew this but it helps me illustrate my idea in my mind lol! But I'm just emailing you about this because I've noticed that A LOT of your game is based off of paraphrasing.

When a woman is challenging you paraphrase. When you want to deep dive you paraphrase. When you try to connect with her emotionally you paraphrase.

Once you can paraphrase her words she feels understood and now you guys can truly connect. And it was something that had been bothering me for YEARS man because I was trying SO HARD to listen to women lol! But I found out that I was just doing it the wrong way which was from a frame of reiteration (male comm) and not paraphrase (female comm).

It's crazy because now I can look back at some of your old post and say OHHHHH that's how he did that! IT's amazing how much power paraphrasing gives you when it comes to communicating with others.

Just wanted to share that with you because it really struck me as gold.”

After reading this email, in a flash, I remembered the years I spent straining and striving to understand women and feed back to them what they'd said, only to have my efforts be tossed right back in my face when girls replied with, "Uh, no, that's not what I meant," or tersely corrected me.

Man, that was frustrating. But it doesn't happen anymore. Why? Well... let me tell you.

You see, our good reader highlights the difference between what a guy who's learning tries to do, and a guy who's got it down does. And I'm going to delve deeper into doing it the right way here, in this post on active listening.

I sat there staring for a moment at the woman who'd walked outside to tell me to clear out, thinking about how to be a powerful man in a situation like this. I was sitting at an empty table -- one of about thirty of them -- in a largely empty seating area in the middle of a square surrounded by a bunch of restaurants.

"You can't sit here, sorry," she told me. I'd gotten my food at one of the restaurants ringing the square. She apparently was from another one. "This seating is only for our customers."

I looked slowly out over the tables. Then I looked back to her. "All of this?" I said, gesturing to the entire square of empty tables.

"Yes," she said. "That's all ours."

I briefly considered. On the one hand, it was incredibly unnecessary for her to come and ask me to get up and leave. It's not like there was a mad grab for tables; they were almost all empty. And it wasn't like me sitting at the table was going to wear the chair out or anything. I supposed there was the risk that I'd leave some crumbs or garbage or something and she'd have to clean up after a non-customer.

But on the other hand, it was her restaurant's private property. They paid for it, they owned the rights to it, and they had final say on who gets to use it, when, and why. That's how it works in cities, where there's basically no public property. Fighting back means fighting the system; police or security get called, and then it's a big mess.

"Okay," I said. "Which restaurant are you?" I asked her. "That one?" I said, pointing to a classy Japanese place.

"No," she said, "that one." She pointed toward a tiny little deli. I had a hard time imagining a deli was going to fill up all these seats with paying customers and that owning the rights to use this big outdoor square (and spending the time to police it all) was worth it.

"Okay," I said, after another moment. "I'll head elsewhere." I slowly started packing up my food.

"Sorry," she said quietly, and walked off, leaving me to pack up and leave. I noticed there'd been some people who'd stopped to watch the interaction. As I slowly packed my things and left, they turned and went their ways.

After I left, I realized I should've just ordered a bottled water for $1 or whatever it was from the deli. I'll do that next time. But regardless, it got me thinking about looking powerful even when you're not getting your way, which can end up being something that makes or breaks your interactions with women, more often than you might care to think.

A man finds himself in conversation with a beautiful woman. Excited, and a little bit nervous, he starts to talk. And he talks more. And more. She can hardly get a word in edgewise.

He feels -- no, he knows -- that if he lets the conversation die down, just for a second, she's apt to get up and leave. So, instead, he decides he must run this conversation like a man possessed... he's got to keep it going himself. He's just got to.

And for a while he does.

Sooner or later though, eventually, he hits a moment where he finishes what he was saying and doesn't know what to say next. There's a pause; it's an awkward pause.

"Well," says the girl, "it was great talking to you. But I have to go find my friends now."

"Uh - okay," says the man. "Nice meeting you."

He never sees her again.

"Drat," he thinks to himself, immediately after she leaves, "if only I'd been able to keep the conversation running a little longer, until we were able to find something that was interesting to her. Then it all would've been okay."

I know this feeling -- I used to experience it myself all the time -- and I'd guess most guys reading this have probably felt it too. What it comes from, though, is a fundamental misconception about how a conversation with a new woman ought to run, and what that conversation is really all about -- and it also shows an inattention to using a very powerful conversational tool for getting things working in your favor: the pregnant pause.

Something that can be a great deal of fun to deploy when talking with some new girl is playful banter. You can quickly find yourself in a riveting, electrifying back and forth that leaves both you and her smiling and excited with this fresh new person you've each just met.

However, if you haven't spent as much developing your technique, playful banter can, instead of being a lot of fun, end up being downright headache-inducing. Pop the aspirin and break out the Alka-Seltzer -- you'll need it (or maybe she will).

And even if you have put time into building good wit, there's a good chance -- particularly if you're newer or even intermediate -- that you haven't learned the timing of using that wit and banter in a conversation with a new woman yet -- and that you may very well go over the top, or go for too long, straying into the land of the socially awkward or even calling up out-and-out auto-rejection via over-gaming, thereby costing yourself a girl who otherwise might've been yours.

For that reason, figuring out the rules of bantering properly ends up being quite important for your early game -- you're not always going to deploy your wit in full force with every young woman you meet, but you will with enough of them that having it honed more or less to a razor's edge can end up making the difference between making it to the mid-game with that new pretty girl you like, or having to bow out early.

Thus, this quick and dirty guide on getting down some of the basics of bantering playfully with women.

You're out and about, in a high end nightclub or a top shelf retail outlet, when you spot an insanely beautiful woman. She's just gorgeous: dressed to the nines, hair flowing and perfect, and standing atop 6 inch heels. You have to meet her.

So, you walk over, start talking to her, and, to bring her back down to Earth and rob her of the inflated status her beauty and style must, you reason, confer, you apply a well-worn tactic from the early days of the codifying of seduction: the PUA neg.

"Nice nails," you ask her, 30 seconds into the conversation. "Are they real?"

That's a neg, and that's how it looks in practice for 99.9% of the guys out there who're using it.

What I want to address with today's post is what the concept behind the neg is, whether negs actually work, and whether there are any alternatives to it.

I'll lead off by telling you this: the neg, at least the way most guys who use it these days use it, is totally not the right way to go.

I had a date Friday night with a young television anchor for one of the big TV stations in China and Hong Kong. Things started out innocently enough -- she put me in the hot seat early on, treating me almost like how I imagine she must treat her interviewees, asking me lots of questions and making it feel like an interview -- but I soon wrested control of the flow of conversation, and pretty soon things were going swimmingly. I used something known as the cold read to do it.

Before you knew it we were well into a deep dive, her telling me all about her past relationships and what she thinks the purpose of life is and what she really wants (children, namely). And it all happened, despite a little while of me being there in the hot seat, more or less effortlessly.

Even not so long ago, I struggled with transitioning into "real" conversation when I was facing women who were professional "talkers" -- reporters, saleswomen, any kind of gal who spoke effusively for a living. The problem was, women like that tend to snap into these routines of making their pitch or going into interview mode, and it can be hard to snap them out of it.

What I ended up returning to to solve this dilemma was something I've developed slowly -- almost unconsciously -- over the past half decade: cold reading.

It's largely because of cold reading that I had this girl who was so used to steering the conversation instead drinking in every moment with me, and by extension it's largely because of cold reading that I had this girl telling me how she'd drank too much (after a mere two drinks, spread across 2 1/2 hours) and all but announcing that I should invite her home to make some bad decisions.

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.