Socializing

In this post, I'd like to share with you a cautionary tale. I'd like to tell you the story of a man named Shopping Guy.

Shopping Guy isn't really his name. His family and his friends call him something else, no doubt; something closer to an actual name and less of a label. But I know him only as Shopping Guy.

Ever find yourself talking to a really cute girl, and have her start acting bored and distracted?

You probably began scrambling hard to try and get her interested again. And, if you succeeded, you likely felt like you'd won a crucial victory, and you felt like things with this girl were now stronger than ever. You'd been on the brink, and recovered.

You also probably were very careful to keep her interested after that, and stay on topics she'd find engaging, and off topics she wouldn't like. You worked harder to make things work, and likely came to value her more highly than you do other women who never seemed bored with you.

I want to work on getting you doing the same thing now with women. We've talked about nonverbal communication before here; this is another piece of the nonverbal puzzle. In this post, I'm going to show you how you can use boredom and the bored look to keep women off of bad topics and on good ones, and make them pay more attention and invest more in your conversations.

This is a strategy that women use all the time. So let's even the odds a little bit and get you using it too.

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.

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."

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.

I've posted a few articles recently that deal with casual relations. "Do Women Only Want Sex?" cuts to the core of what, specifically, women want from men; "Sexiness is Critical to Casual Relations" discusses some research highlighting how important being sexy is to netting rapid intimacy with women.

A reader sent me an email the other day after reading some of the posts on rapid intimacy, asking if I can help identify what it is he might be doing wrong. An excerpt from his message:

“I just can't figure out how any guy can sleep around without misleading girls about his intentions. With a lot of girls, I feel like I'm in a weird zone where they think I only want casual sex, but that they aren't attracted to me enough, so they don't like me at all (and I don't know whether I'm not attractive enough for them or whether they just don't want casual sex.) In this zone, they don't really want me around cuz they see me just as a roving dick on the hunt. That's what honesty gets you... But maybe I need to be more honest about the side of me that wants to get to know them? How do I even do that? Currently I just try to have fun with people, which is how I got over the creepy vibe, but I still feel like I have this worthless-player vibe.”

Okay, so I have a pretty good feeling for where this gent is. He is, it seems to me, at the point where he's relying on being fun and entertaining to keep women's interest and get them to like him, but it isn't translating well to intimacy, and he feels that without being fun and entertaining, he doesn't have much else to offer and people dub him "creepy."

Kind of a Catch-22: being fun and entertaining means women don't see you as all that sexual, but dropping the fun and entertaining vibe means people don't want to hang around and that certainly isn't terribly conducive to bedding new girls either.

Now, there's a post on this site up about how to be a sexy man, and that's the first place I'll point anyone who wants to know how to start instilling the right kinds of emotions in a woman: interest, curiosity, intrigue, and arousal. And we talk a lot about the drawbacks of being the entertainer guy in "Reactions from Women, or Results with Women? So those are a couple of great places to start if you're looking to get out of the habit of being entertaining and into the habit of being sexy.

But if you drop the fun and entertaining slant, and you end up seeming creepy… what causes that? That's the main thing I'd like to address in this post; basically, how not to be the creepy guy.

Several nights ago, I was out with a friend in a nightclub, and I noticed a cute platinum blonde German girl standing next to him not doing anything while the two friends she was with, a girl and a guy, flirted back and forth. "You should talk to that girl," I suggested. So he did, and she happily engaged.

At one point though, he turned to me and said, "Chase, where did you say you were from again?" and then introduced the girl to me and told her where I was from. She quickly jumped off of him and rotated around to my side, away from him, and began chatting me up. I flirted with her, pinched her arm a bit, had her tell me why she was in China if she disliked it so much. My buddy eventually roped her back in again, and I withdrew. She peeled off and left a short time later.

After she left, I asked my friend a question: "Why did you introduce her to me? Did you run out of conversation with her?" He said that no, things had just been slowing down, so he thought perhaps adding another interesting person to the mix might spice the interaction up a bit.

"Dude," I said, "you broke circle. Never be the first to break circle when you're talking to a girl." He didn't know what I meant, so I explained.