Note
before we get started: this one’s more for intermediate and up
guys who are running into this issue. For guys who are beginners, stick
with treating your interactions with women more “mechanistically” and
breaking them down into bite-sized pieces and goals you’re trying to
accomplish and milestones you’re trying to pass – you’ll learn a lot
faster that way. Think of this article as “switching to natural... once
you’re already fairly good.”
A reader named Robert writes in:
“I have a question, hope you guys can answer it for me!
I have pretty solid game, can get girls, move things forwards etc.. etc...
Where I stumble is in my own experience of the whole interaction- MY attraction to HER! Is it because I’m not going for hot enough girls? I’ll get super turned on when the situation is still unclear, and sex is not guaranteed. But then once I am pretty sure it’s gonna happen, I will lead her to it, but my arousal is wayyy less than earlier/before the interaction.
My thoughts are I should try to escalate as I feel the tension, in slow, somewhat intense and subtle ways... focusing more on the vibe and staying with it. Or perhaps convince myself that sex is not guaranteed yet? Or is this a sign that I am simply trying to pump my own ego, and the attraction isn’t real to begin with?”
Ah, yes. An all too common issue of the developing seducer: why does reaching the point where she’s ready to go to bed with you kill all your interest in the sex?
The instant it’s unequivocally clear that yes, she DOES want to go to bed with you, and WILL go to bed with you – POOF! All the crazy desire you had to go to bed with her up until that point just vanishes.
Where did it go, and why does this happen?
In It to Win It
Many of the men who get good with women are hedonists to the extreme; they live in the moment, they live for right now, and there is nothing they love more than pleasure.
For such a man, this issue does not normally manifest, because the
pleasure itself is the goal; no pleasure, no happy. His motivation
carries him through to intimacy nearly every time.
However, there is another sort of man who pursues superior aptitude with women as well, and that is the achievement-focused man. This man is not as responsive to pleasure – maybe his brain is just wired differently, or his nerve endings are not as sensitive – and so gets more enjoyment out of ticking achievements off of his list than he does burying himself in sensation.
The problem that this man encounters is if his internal “scoring system” is set up in a way that “she wants it and I could get it” is almost equal to “I got it.”
In this case, opportunity cost calculations kick in, the man looks at the scenario, and says, “I could have it, so I get the achievement. And besides the achievement, there isn’t really anything else here I’m interested in.”
Then he eases up on the accelerator, hits the off-ramp from the sexual highway, and turns off the road to call it a night and go head back home.
Only later does he reassess and say to himself, “Man, I had that girl and I let her go because I figured I had her already and then I just didn’t bother pursuing it anymore. And as a result, I didn’t get her! What is wrong with me?”
What’s wrong is that his rational priorities and his emotional priorities are not inline, and until they are, he’ll continue to have these frustrating episodes.
Decision Time
When you notice this happening to yourself, you’ve effectively come upon a moment in need of a decision. Your rational objectives and emotional objectives are mismatched, and you’re going to keep running into the frustrating disconnect of part of you wanting you to do one thing while another part compels you to do another.
So do you want to:
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Change your rational objective to match your emotional one (e.g.: I only care about sleeping with women I’m really into, so I’m going to leave off going for women I’m less into from here on out)
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Change your emotional objective to match your rational one (e.g.: I’m going to shift my emotions to really enjoy sleeping with women even if they aren’t exactly my ideal)
This is a “different strokes for different folks” moment. Also depends on where you are and what you’re trying to do.
Personally, for personal growth reasons, I’d recommend the second path, because it opens you up to a lot more experiences and isn’t going to negatively affect the caliber of girlfriend you end up with anyway (as confidence and sexual success goes up, standards for casual flings go down while girlfriend criteria remain the same) – if anything, the range of experiences will continue to help you refine your skill set with women while making those women you do really click with stand in contrast to the more everyday gals you sleep with all the more clearly.
However, maybe you’re satisfied your abilities with women are sufficient, and reaching a point where you honestly enjoy casual flings even with girls who are just marginally cute to you instead of only going for girls you’re really excited about isn’t something you have much real desire to attain when you sit down and think about it.
If that’s the case, the way forward’s pretty clear – just focus your energies in life on something else and quit worrying about trying to pick up every girl you see. Don’t break those skills out until you cross paths with a woman who really excites you.
You’ll probably have a wind-down period where your old mental programming is still telling you to go for girls who aren’t your ideal and maybe you’ll feel a little bad if you don’t – don’t try to talk yourself out of it, since that only breeds mental blowback; instead just say something like, “Well if I’m that excited about that girl, maybe next time I should go for girls like her,” and either you will resolve to do so next time, or you’ll realize that actually, no, I don’t really want girls like her, and it’ll bother you no more.
Becoming the Sometimes-Hedonist
Let’s say you’d like to bring your emotional objectives more inline with your rational ones, though.
You don’t want to be emotionally satisfied at “knowing you could have her” anymore, but instead you want to become the man who truly is in it for the sex – he’s in it for the woman herself; having her, enjoying her, experiencing her... not for the satisfaction of knowing that she wants him bad enough that he “could have her” if he wanted to, while in real life he just walks away from her.
How do you do this?
The biggest factors in this, so far as I can tell, are:
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Freeing yourself from a mechanical approach to seduction. You’re much better able to enjoy everything when it’s a seamless, natural progression for you rather than a series of steps you are consciously trying to navigate.
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Freeing yourself from a “she reflects on me” view. The other one is viewing the women you sleep with as reflecting upon you, which I think is something all non-naturally hedonistic men tend to do at the outset. It might be because of spending one’s formative adolescent years without an abundance of women perhaps, or it might just be a lack of absolute abundance and a fear of being sucked into a relationship with a woman who isn’t your ideal. Either way, once you reach absolute abundance and you know you can go out and get a girlfriend-caliber girl pretty much whenever you want, you quit worrying about a girl you just wanted to share a night with “trapping” you, because that stops being able to happen if you don’t want it to.
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Viewing women more sexually. Here’s another one that I think contributes to the mentality, or at least contributed to my personal formation of it. One of the first articles on this site was “Picture the Conquest”, a post I made when I was in the middle of making this transition myself. I started spending more time imagining the women around me with their clothes off when I was out and about, to sexualize women much more. I realized that, at the time, I was viewing most of the women I interacted with as this sexless “people”, and only getting turned on automatically by women I clicked with extremely well. What if you could train myself to click that way with almost every girl? That’s where “Picture the Conquest” came from, and the mindset shift for me was a big help.
So. Of these, focusing on really sexualizing all the women around you that you run into mentally is the most easily actionable. Moving from a mechanistic view of seduction to a fluid one is a fair bit harder, because you’ve actually got to more or less master the meeting-to-mating process before you can make that switch; and absolute abundance is of course arguably just as hard, though you don’t necessarily need one to get the other (don’t need a fluid, natural seduction process to get absolute abundance, nor do you need absolute abundance to get a fully fluid process down).
Oh, and, there’s one other one that’s quite possibly the most actionable of the bunch, and can get you at least sleeping with women instead of passing up encounters because you get lazy and don’t want it anymore once you’ve “won” (of course, we both know that thinking you could get a girl if you just closed things out and actually getting the girl are worlds apart). That actionable item is:
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Invite her home.
If she’s ready to go, invite her home.
You indifferent about it at this point? Doesn’t matter – invite her home.
You get into this habit, you start to do it automatically. You don’t even think about it anymore.
Then, once she’s home, you get into the habit of making a move within 10 minutes. That prevents you from going, “Eh, I don’t really want it, so I’ll just sit here and chicken out and not make a move and tell myself it’s because I’m not really feeling it when actually I’m just afraid I’ll go for it and she’ll say ‘no’.”
Once those habits are in place, you are at least racking up more experiences and beating yourself up less for passing up girls you could have had but got indifferent once you thought you had them.
Something else happens too – you realize that some of those girls you thought you “had” maybe you didn’t really have after all... because once you start inviting women home and inviting them to bed with you you realize that, at least before you’re razor sharp at this, you’ll still fumble a lot of lays anyway, and maybe some of those layups weren’t the layups you thought. Only experience can truly tell you.
Benefits of the Sometimes-Hedonist
Well, anyway – why would you want
to be a “sometimes hedonist” like this who honestly enjoys sleeping
with all kinds of women purely for the sex and connection itself,
and not the winning or achievement?
For me, I think it’s freeing. Knowing that you can go out and meet some cute girl and legitimately fully enjoy immersing yourself into a fresh sexual experience with her, and give her an equally enjoyable time – it feels good. The world feels like a much warmer, friendlier place when you can do this.
Also, it makes you a far more empathetic person. When you’re dealing with seduction mechanistically and becoming indifferent to women once you’ve “won”, you’re stuck in a paradigm where you’re viewing things from a totally piecemeal perspective... it’s not actually about the fusion of you and this girl, it’s about beating the levels of the game, and once you feel like you’ve got the “W” if you keep playing, you get bored and leave. If you transition to a mentality where it’s not a series of levels or milestones but, rather, a coming together of two souls and two bodies (and a heck of a lot of pleasure), you start seeing women as women; as these individual people with their wants and needs and insecurities and fears a lot more, and you care about them more and you want to make them feel good about themselves... with your attention and your sex.
Finally, it makes you just a looser, cooler, less uptight individual. I mean, who’s more badass: the guy who says, “I can only enjoy myself when having sex with my equal,” or the guy who says, “I enjoy intimacy with all kinds of women; so long as I find her pretty... or find something about her I find pretty... for me, that’s enough.” No contest, right?
That “coolness” factor is because we sense something about these two guys; one has made his peace with himself and womankind, while the other still needs to protect himself by constructing mental walls to guard against something he can’t quite articulate.
Learning to become a sometimes-hedonist with women isn’t like becoming a full-on hedonist whose life revolves around getting laid either. It just means you can enjoy it a lot more when you choose to indulge.
The real advantage is just the freedom: to be able to get together with a girl and fully enjoy it, even if she’s more average-girl-on-the-street material than she is girl-of-your-dreams material. That’s a nice feeling.
Chase
Also recommended: “Lower Your Standards (and Date Hotter Girls).”
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