Emotion

In "How to Pick Up Girls in Bars and Clubs," we had a look in passing at why dance clubs and dance floor game are so difficult to get real results with women in, aside from make outs and rapid escalations that usually don't ever lead to anything much more.

There we called it "emotional spiking," but this spiking is actually the result of a far broader and more common phenomenon seen everywhere in life and love, dance clubs being only among the more extreme examples. The phenomenon is one I've dubbed emotional cresting, and it creates some interesting wrinkles in how your interactions with people - women and men alike - play out.

Emotional cresting is about taking emotions to their extremes - those emotional spikes we mentioned before. It follows the process of emotional escalation that we mentioned as so crucial to the process of preparing a woman for intimacy in How to Make Girls Chase, except that it's an intrinsic part of everything.

There's great power in emotional cresting, but there's also significant danger to your interactions in it as well - because the higher you crest, the bigger the crash is if you can't maintain that emotional momentum.

When I first decided to start tackling women and dating as a skill set to methodically improve at the end of 2004, I went into it with three distinct aims:

• Be a seductive, charming bad boy,
• Constantly test the limits and push to improve, and
• Make women feel special.

I didn't know exactly what I was doing or how my learning curve would look, but I trusted that as I chipped away at learning the ability to do better with women, I would indeed get it down, as I had a diverse array of other skills.

It wasn't until a year later that I found the pick up community. Many parts of it excited me; I couldn't believe there was an entire group of men who'd worked to develop this same skill set too, some much further along than myself. But there was one part that mystified me:

These guys didn't seem to know how to make a girl feel special.

So much of their stuff revolved around spitting out scripted lines and "canned routines" at girls, which I tried, briefly, but tossed aside after only a few weeks. It didn't feel genuine at all, and it wasn't how I wanted my interactions with women to be.

They had lots of great advice, to be sure; studying the findings of these guys who'd already been down the path I'd set myself out on was immensely helpful. But in that one department -- in making girls feel special -- I was pretty sure I had something they didn't.

An emotional connection is one of those fleeting, powerful things that can seem all too rare and all too outside one's control. It can seem like it's just chance when you happen upon one -- as if but by the grace of God it came into being.

But it doesn't have to be. Just like succeeding with women in general -- just like figuring out how to launch businesses and succeed financially -- just like anything in life -- the ability to build an emotional connection is something that can be learned.

Most people don't like to hear that. Most people want to think that all in life is pure happenstance and nothing other than fate determines the outcome of their lives. But those of us actively in pursuit of bettering ourselves and of mastering the skills to control our own destinies know better -- that a lot less in life is chance than most folks think.

A lot of it is skill.

And learning to connect with people on an emotional level is one of the most powerful, practical, wide-reaching skills you can possibly learn. If you haven't given much thought to this one before, it's high time you started.

I met a really very cute and pretty 20 year old college student waiting in line for the bus today. We started talking and grabbed seats together – actually, we almost missed the bus, too engrossed in talking to each other as we were, until we suddenly realized everyone else had walked past us and boarded already!

Our conversation flowed smoothly, but I could tell she had just the slightest hint of reservation, though I did not know why. I was being quite calm and nice with her, and was relatively certain I wasn’t coming across too strongly, and I did my best to stay away from any overly high-value topics, aside from speaking a little French with her and discussing my impression of France while traveling there a few years back when she mentioned learning French and wanting to visit Paris. Even that might have been a little too much, but overall I estimated the benefit of having these additional things to bond on outweighed the danger of showing too much value.

It wasn’t until near the end of the bus ride, fifteen or twenty minutes after we had already exchanged contact information and tentatively discussed meeting this weekend, that she finally came out with what it was that was keeping her reserved. I was able to get to it by asking her some deeper emotional questions – she discussed not loving what she studied in college, so I asked her what she loved. She then told me that her boyfriend had been disappearing together with his ex-girlfriend and not taking her phone calls.

Just watched the new Iron Man 2 trailer that came out today. See it here: