Preparedness: The All-Important Seduction Tool

Back in 2006, I had a date in Washington, D.C. with a beautiful Puerto Rican girl, who just exuded sensuality. I'd met her riding the metro one day, I no longer remember to where. Regardless, I was still getting my feet under me, and was pretty clumsy in how I ran my dates at that point - and this date ended up being no exception.

We went to get brunch first, and I decided to try out asking a girl to pay for me for the first time. I was a little nervous doing it... and she was furious. She got really upset. She was clearly insulted. She scolded me on how women in Puerto Rico never pay for dates.

But then she calmed down... and then she paid for us both.

After that, I figured I'd take her to the Barnes & Noble nearby, and we grabbed some books and sat down together. Her anger had transformed into raw, heaving lust... as will tend to happen when women overcome some staunchly held rule of theirs and cut you an exception, then continue spending time on you (complete surprise to me at the time, though). In the bookstore, she was soon leaning up against me on the ground beneath the book stacks, breathing heavy, the sexiest smile in the world on her face, and seemed for all the world to be puffing out plumes of pheromones into the air around us. Both of us were very turned on.

But Barnes & Noble turned out to be a bad call - and another sign I didn't really know what I was doing. Yet, rather than take her home then and there, I'd already decided earlier that I should buy her ice cream to even out the spending (since she'd paid for lunch) - yet another bad call. Things went from hot to lukewarm while we at ice cream... and then I finally invited her home to talk and relax some more.

I decided to have us walk from there back to my apartment - a 20-minute walk. Half way there, any last vestiges of desire had faded away completely and been replaced by complaining about how far we were walking and where we were going, and it didn't stop for the rest of the walk. I took her up to the roof of my building, which I hadn't scoped out carefully enough before, and we ended up sitting there in uncomfortable seats positioned too far away from one another. After about 10 minutes of rather platonic chatting, I tried to move her back down to my apartment, but she decided she'd rather just go home.

The magic was gone.

And I learned an important lesson: make sure you're prepared for anything that happens.

I botched that date so bad because I'd expected it to go very differently than it did. Namely, many of the things that happened I had not expected to happen:

• I hadn't expected her emotions to spike after I asked her to pay

• I hadn't expected that anger, mixed with us touching in the bookstore, to arouse her so heavily and put her in "mating mode"

• I hadn't expected to have to try and get a girl out of a bookstore and back to my place in only a few minutes before the fire wore off and she went ice cold

• I hadn't expected to need to be trying to sleep with her as soon as we got back

• I hadn't expected the rooftop to be so un-sexy, based on some other rooftops I'd used before

• I hadn't expected to be trying to run things from behind, with the emotional crest already having come and gone - I thought I'd still be building up to the crest by the time I got her back home
  

My lack of preparation in this case spelled my doom, and I lost the girl, never to see her again. I tried many times over the next few months to get her out for a second date, but she'd only counteroffer to have me come join her with her and her friends out cavorting around in what I knew was probably a drive to reposition me in the friend zone.

I'd gone from girl heaving with desire for me to girl who only wanted me as a "just friends" orbiter all because I hadn't been properly prepared.

Knowing Your Contingencies

Ricardus talked about preparedness and backup plans before on this site, in "What If She Doesn't Have Time? (and Other Contingencies)." In "Other Contingencies", Ric was mostly focused on what happens if you're planning for a "yes" or a "no", and you get a "maybe"... one of the big ones that will throw you off when you're not yet accustomed to it.

I won't go over that again so we're not repeating ourselves too much here. What I want to talk about today is a different kind of contingency planning; namely, what happens when things move at a pace you simply did not expect?

We'll talk a little about when you expect things to happen fast, but find they happen slow.

But what I really want to talk about is the one that makes you pull out your hair the most when you're just learning... what happens when you thought things were going to take a while, but suddenly they just start happening a whole lot faster than you'd planned them to?

Fast as Fast Can Be

Having girls you thought it was going to be a piece of cake with put the brakes on is annoying, but it usually isn't the end of the world... there are only two things you really need to do when you have things break this way:

1. Be nonplussed. Put on your best game face and do your best to act like everything is going exactly as you planned... even though it isn't.

2. Decide whether to push for the close or use date compression. If she's slowed things way down, you can either break out the hard push and your best to make something happen now, or you can decide to end things a little bit early, while you're still in control and can wrap them up on your own terms, and employ date compression instead. Which you use depends on your situation (just in town for a night vs. this is where you live; plenty of free time to pursue subsequent meetings vs. extremely busy and it's now or never; etc.) and on what your objective is with the encounter (try to push your limits as much as possible vs. lock up a girl you think you might want as a girlfriend).

The main variable to overcome with girls throwing on the emergency brake is just remaining visibly unaffected and not looking like you've had the wind sucked out of you, and then planning appropriately and either pushing for more then and there or ending things on a high note soon thereafter, rather than letting them drag out interminably in the confused "What do I do now?" way many an inexperienced man does when the girl does not bite on the things he thought she was going to bite on.

Just keep in mind to play it cool and either push for more or wrap it up, and you'll be fine.

But that's just when she wants to move slower than you expected. When she wants to move faster, well... that's a whole 'nother ball game.

Because when she wants to move faster with you, now it's not just the matter of you not knowing exactly what to do and finding yourself somewhat adrift, but it's also the matter that you're dealing with a rapidly-expiring escalation window... and, the clock is ticking.

I'd say it took me a pretty healthy chunk of time to get to a place where I was usually not surprised by women wanting (or needing) to move unexpectedly fast with me.

Before then, it was quite often jarring, or even annoying. I'd often end up feeling something akin to, "But there's a lot more I need to do with you first - I'm not ready to have all this pressure put on me yet!"

Even still, I'd push myself to speed things up as much as I could and try to give girls what they wanted in these scenarios... frequently botching things, but sometimes getting lucky and stumbling my way to success, and their (and my) satisfaction.

Of course, that's when I started encountering the issues I talked about in the article on performance anxiety - things were happening so fast and unexpectedly I was out of my element and not ready to perform - but even then I was of the mind that you should always be having sex if you had the chance to with a reasonably attractive girl (who wasn't crazy or anything like that), because it's an important part of the training and reward system for leveling up your abilities with the fairer sex.

The mindset I finally ended up with, and the kind of preparations I learned how to take, are what I'll be discussing for the remainder of the article here.

Mental Preparedness

The first rule of mental preparedness in seduction is realizing that the different women you meet will be ready to go at all kinds of different speeds, and that the tighter your fundamentals get, the faster those speeds generally are.

What shocked me a lot early on with women was that I did not see myself as a sexy man. I was a little chunky, I had bad clothes and a cheap haircut, my voice was inelegant, and I was sometimes a little too much of a dick (inadvertently). My only redeeming attractive qualities were that I was somewhat facially attractive, I had excellent eye contact, moved slowly and powerfully, had a pretty sharp wit, and I had something of an edge already developed. But, coming from a background of not interacting with women much except in the most superficial of interactions, I considered myself an extreme underdog who had a lot of work to do.

And while I did get rejected by girls quite a bit - and you never reach a point where you never get rejected - I nevertheless had some girls who were attracted to me fast - occasionally even right away.

I could see it - sense it - but I didn't really believe it, and didn't know what to do with it. "She'll probably lose interest as soon as I try to make a move," I'd tell myself, and do nothing, and lose the girl.

All that really was, though, was lack of mental preparedness losing me a lot of extremely valuable early learning experiences and confidence boosters that my lack of readiness for made me take me a lot longer to end up getting.

So, what are the keys to not being surprised mentally by women wanting to go a lot faster than you expected they were? Here they are:

1. Realize that women themselves are all in very different modes. Many women you meet will not be interested in sex or even a date when you meet them. They might like you or not; might think you're cute or not; but might be disinterested in pursuing anything with you anyway regardless. Other women you meet will be interested in getting to know you better, perhaps over drinks next week. Still others will be intrigued by you, and want to get to know you more right now. And more still will want you to just stop talking and taking them home already. You will not know who these women are or be able to identify them with much certainty from the distance until you talk to them... at least not until your ability to target starts getting honed (from lots and lots of practice) - and even then, you'll still be surprised a lot more often than you might think.

2. Realize that how women respond to you is out of your control. Sure, you can work on your fundamentals and up your passive attractiveness (by quite a lot, actually), and you can do other things like create preselection, social proof, display physical dominance, or even conspicuously consume to up your in-venue attractiveness, but all these things do is really up your odds... when you walk up to that girl and say "hi", you're still rolling the dice on how she's going to respond. When you're newer, you tend to think you can control some or all of that; experience brings humility though, and you learn that all you can do is stack the odds as much in your favor as possible, then go throw your pieces down and see where they land.

3. Realize that you must be ready to respond to what you get. Because women's responses are so out of your control, you must be flexible in how you respond to what you get back. If you try to follow the same exact steps (or the same exact routine) every time with every girl, all you end up doing is screening most of the women you meet out.

4. Have a good idea of what you are looking for... out of all the possibilities. What are you looking for when you go out and talk to girls? Are you looking for a girl you'll connect with for a few minutes, then ask out and trade numbers? Are you looking for a girl you're going to meet who's going to be lukewarm to you, but through Herculean efforts you're going to change her mind, pull off the coup of the century, and manage to get her back home with you anyway? Are you looking for a girl you're just going to have sparks fly with the moment you meet her, and the two of you are leaving to head somewhere private 20 minutes after "hello"? You can't do what you'd do with one of these girls with a different one - trying to set up a date and grab a number in just a few minutes of conversation with the girl who isn't interested at first is going to land you nothing but a flakey number, while running through 2 hours of attraction material with a girl who loved you from the moment you said "hello" is only going to kill her enthusiasm and send her off looking for someone else instead.

Mental preparedness is one of those things you don't really hear talk about when discussing meeting women, pick up, or "game", but it's one of the many differentiators between the experienced practitioner, who's able to adjust his approach on the fly based on how the woman he's met is responding to him, versus the beginning student of the game, who's trying to do the same thing with every woman and is unprepared for women responding to him differently than he anticipated they would.

Logistical Preparedness

The other side of the coin - and the easier of the two to work on - is logistical preparedness. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that this is the more important of the two for a beginner (but somewhat less important than mental preparedness for a more experienced man), simply because it gets you thinking about a variety of different possible outcomes, which provides a certain degree of mental preparedness in and of itself.

Your logistical preparedness extends beyond simply readying your sex logistics for possible consummation of a date or a chance encounter. Instead, it's more about having certain things in place to make it easy to change courses when courses need changing.

I'll list some examples for you here so you know what I mean:

1. Have a bachelor pad that's set up and ready. That means clean, inviting, with chairs a girl might sit in to isolate herself packed up or thrown away, and everything designed to be cozy and intimate and closeness-inducing. Have different alcohols available and drink-making instructions so you can mix drinks if you and a girl need a little extra time to get comfortable. Have music ready to put on if necessary, or your television turned to a news channel or music video channel to provide distraction for her logical mind while you work your magic on her mental one. If your sofa, couch, or loveseat is much bigger than two people, stack some boxes on it and throw some dirty laundry on top so that the only place there is to sit down is right next to you - or dump the couch altogether and leave nowhere to sit in the whole place but your bed.

2. Keep condoms on your person, and a towel in your car. That would seem obvious, but I can't tell you how many guys I've had tell me stories about how they hadn't brought condoms because they hadn't planned on doing any more than just chatting a girl or two up that day or night, and then a few hours later they found themselves passionately making out with some random girl in a bathroom stall, but had to settle for a blow job because they left their jimmy hats at home (especially if you're the type of guy who won't have sex without strapping up... or she seems like the kind of girl you wouldn't really want to make an exception for). Likewise, for making sex logistics on the fly a lot easier, always keep a towel in the trunk of your car, if you're in a driving town and you drive to your dates and going out locations... a good, thick towel can make all the difference between grass, dirt, or sand being too uncomfortable to do anything too exciting on, and making those surfaces perfect to do something exciting on.

3. Plan your dates to be logistically easy. Unless you're doing just a pure informational date, you want to be planning every date to at least potentially end up back at yours (and even then... it's worth taking a few minutes to plan out a "just in case" strategy for your informational dates, too - nothing's worse than skipping your usual planning because you think you won't need it, only to get there and she's raring to go with you having nowhere to take her). Doesn't matter if it's the first date and you don't normally do first date sex; plan it out anyway. The 9 times you don't use it will immediately become worth having done the 1 time you do, and avoid having to beat yourself up over missing out on something great because you hadn't bothered to be prepared.

4. If driving, park close; if walking or metro'ing, bring cab fare. Nothing like a long walk to cool off hot lust. If you're bringing a girl who's ready to have you back to your car, make sure your car isn't parked far from where you're going to meet her; conversely, if you took the train, bus, or hoofed it over, and it's more than 5 to 7 minutes door-to-door to your place, bring taxi money. You're a cheapskate who hates spending on taxis normally? Set it aside; in this case, you want to splurge... the couple of bucks you have to pay for a taxi will usually mean the difference between sex happening, and sex not happening.

5. Always propose things close to your place (or other seduction location). Get in the habit of never agreeing to dates that are far away from where you need to take a girl to take her to bed. You want this habit because women will sometimes surprise you with date offers - and if you're not careful, you'll catch yourself assenting to things that are terrible for seduction ("Hey! I know what we can do - my friend's having a birthday party up in [really faraway location] Friday night - why don't you come with me?"). Also good to do: don't agree to any kind of party date or date with friends, ever, unless it was your idea and they are your friends (or, alternately, you're bringing a posse of friends along with you... even if it all goes belly up, at least you'll have your buddies to keep you company).

6. Have a couple of "pull lines" in your holsters ready to draw at a moment's notice. When you're starting out, you'll sometimes find yourself in situations where you KNOW you should pull a girl out of there and take her home; you just... don't really know what to say. So, nervously, you keep your mouth shut, the moment passes, and nothing EVER happens with her. Instead, decide on a few simple phrases you can use wherever you are to get women out of there - e.g., "This place blows... I know where we can go. Let's change venues," or, "You know what? I challenge you to a game of darts and/or billiards at Chez Amante. Refreshments of wine and cheese will be provided. Let's get out of here."

Especially when you're still not at an experience level yet where mental preparedness comes easily, having your logistical concerns sorted and set before you even set foot outside your door gives you some added peace of mind and greases the wheels of your upcoming seductions. These also take a big chunk of the pressure off when you realize a girl is ready a lot sooner than you thought she was going to be, so instead of freezing, all you now have to do is grab the tools you've set out in advance and use them.

Don't underestimate the impact of having all your tools already laid out in front of you right when you need them, as opposed to having to go root around in your toolshed to try and find them with the clock running out, only to not be able to figure out where you last left them.

Preparation

After the date with that Puerto Rican girl - the latest in a string of botched or poorly timed dates and pull opportunities for me then - I realized how important it was to not have overly complicated dates that didn't lend themselves to pulling, or to try to stick too closely to a specific set of steps when out meeting women that I lacked the mental flexibility to skip.

So, I started prepping my dates to always have backup logistics, and started prepping myself to be ready to pull girls home as soon as I started seeing the signals they were ready for this when out... regardless of how ready *I* was.

The result was that I started sleeping with girls on first dates that I'd only intended as "getting to know you" style dates, and I started picking up girls on nights I'd only really intended to go out and just put a little time in talking to girls. I made the shift from "beginner" to "journeyman" in the game due, at least in part, to the greater flexibility that came from a healthy dose of both mental preparedness, and logistical preparedness.

It's a little challenging to get yourself mentally prepared for almost anything without first having encountered almost anything - part of the process of getting here is simply getting enough reference points that you now know to expect surprises (pleasant and otherwise). But you can still focus on trying to be ready mentally nevertheless.

The one you have absolutely no excuse for skipping, however, is logistical preparedness; if you don't spend a few minutes crossing your logistical "t"s and dotting your logistical "i"s before you go out to socialize or have a date... well, you're being a blockhead.

Take a little time to make sure you're prepared. A little preparedness goes a long way.

Ciao,
Chase