Tactics Tuesdays: The Friend Zone Date

Sometimes you’re out and about and you meet a girl and take a number from her.

And for whatever reason, she isn’t all that attracted to you.

Yet for whatever reason, she still gives you her phone number.

And then for whatever reason, she agrees to meet up with you.

But you can sense this one is going through the motions.

It might not quite be the friend zone yet, but it’s pretty darn close. And she doesn’t even know you.

So what do you do... just meet up with her anyway and hope you can change her mind?

Well, you CAN do that... but if you don’t have a game plan for it, it’s like opting for a few games of Black Jack when you don’t really understand how to play Black Jack.

There’s some chance you walk away with winnings, but most of the time you’re only going to waste your time, probably going to waste your money, and if your ego’s wrapped up in it you may well take a self-esteem hit too.

So let’s set out some strategy for those “friend zone” dates, and talk:

• Prevention,
• Treatment, and
• Cure
  

Preventing the Friend Zone Date Outright

You can easily avoid most friend zone dates by doing one simple thing:

Dial up your sexual vibe, forwardness, and sexual tension from the get-go.

I used to get the odd friend zone date every so often before I worked on learning sexiness. Once I was coming across sufficiently sexy (and sexually forward), however, these dropped down to a trickle... these days the only time a girl ever thinks she might be able to get a friend zone date with me is if she’s my senior (and that’s pretty rare, since I’m over 30, and the women I go for are under it), or she’s kind of tuned out or not super socially aware.

Friend zone dates happen when:

• A woman likes you, as in, “This guy seems worth knowing”
• However, she ISN’T excited about you, as in, “I might like to date/sleep with him”
• And then she opts to meet you for something just to see where it goes
  

If she gets strong signs of sexuality from you, however, one of two things happens:

• Either she wakes up and says, “Wow, this guy’s hot,” or
• She turns her nose up and says, “Ugh, he’ll just try to get in my pants”
  

These are both good things, because it means the women who are attracted to you snap out of autopilot and don’t just proceed forward with you in a blasé fashion, while the women who are not attracted to you screen themselves out because they know you won’t settle for just giving them time, attention, and validation in exchange for their presences.

So... if you find yourself dealing with far too many friend zone dates, and you’d like to cut this down to a minimum of the numbers you take and dates you arrange, work on your sexiness. The sexier you come across, the less likely it is a woman will look at you and think, “He’d make a nice guy pal!”

Treating the Friend Zone Date

Sometimes, you can detect an upcoming friend zone date ahead of time by how she’s texting you:

You: Let’s grab those drinks – what’s your schedule like?

Her: Actually, can we make it lunch? My evenings are packed this week.

When she starts negotiating on terms with you, that’s when your radar should go up. This isn’t always a bad thing, and sometimes women will even negotiate for terms that are more favorable to a date than less.

However, in this example, she’s working to move the date from something more obviously conducive to hooking up (drinks) to something less obviously conducive (lunch), which is akin to how I recommend you renegotiate terms toward what you want if you get, say a party date invitation.

There’s another thing she does in this text that should set your warnings bells off too, and that’s that she makes her rationale all about her. She doesn’t show any consideration for you; she doesn’t try to make it fun. She doesn’t say, “Can we do lunch? There’s this really amazing place I’ve been dying to try... I think you’ll like it!” She doesn’t say, “Can we do lunch? Or if that doesn’t work, how about this weekend?”

She just says let’s do lunch, I’m busy.

That is a big spankin’ red flag that you likely ain’t spit to her.

You’re not a guy she’s feeling even mildly weak in the nethers about meeting up with.

Now, caveat, I would advise that, especially when you are new, you still just go on dates like this anyway, even if your instincts are saying, “Aw man, she just wants to make me her friend,” because even when you’re a pro you will still get this wrong sometimes (and end up with a new lay you did not expect to have)... and when you’re new, you will absolutely get it wrong, and more often than not.

It’s worth having a few more frustrating go-nowhere dates in order to collect more reference points. So my advice for the greenhorns is “just proceed forward normally anyway.”

HOWEVER... if you’re intermediate or up, this is what you do:

• When she’s texting you in the “Let’s do it on my terms, because you’re just some guy who’s maybe worthwhile as a friend or maybe isn’t” tone, you just go along with it and set up the date as usual

• The night before the day of the date, you flake. It’s better if you do this the night before instead of the day of, since nighttime has romantic/sexual connotations and if you do it during the day she’ll be in a business/platonic mindset and she doesn’t like you enough yet to snap out of that for you. If you don’t usually flake on dates, here’s a quick primer on how to do it:

• Don’t be a complete jerk and stand her up outright or only ping her 5 minutes before the date that you can’t make it. Let her know anywhere from an hour to a day before instead. In this case, make it the night before.
  

• When you flake, always use a reason that’s outside your control, and preferably one that is social. e.g., “My boss is making me work late” beats “I just came down with rickets”, and “Hey, I have to get a rain check, my college roommate just flew into town and I haven’t seen him in 4 years” beats the boss making you work late.

• Don’t offer or attempt to reschedule in the flake text. Don’t say “I can’t make it, can we do Thursday instead?” Either she’s bummed you can’t make it and won’t be excited about scheduling another date you might just cancel on, or she’s annoyed at some platonic guy she doesn’t even care about being presumptuous enough to dare flake on her, and doesn’t want to honor him with a reschedule. Give her a few days to let it sink in, then you will reschedule
  

• Now, wait 4 to 7 days, and go for the reschedule.
  

It’s been my experience that you will lose a chunk of these girls this way, and they will simply never reschedule with you. They may never respond to you ever again, period. Which is fine. If you gave plenty of notice and worded your text in an understandable way, she will only ever completely ditch you if your value was seemingly so low to her that she may have even flaked on the date herself if you hadn’t beat her to it. Even had you gotten her on the date, the odds you would’ve turned things around were minuscule. You didn’t lose anything here.

However, the girls who reschedule are invariably more attracted to you. That’s because flaking indirectly communicates preselection (she is not used to men flaking on her, and especially not men she had slated for probable friend zone status), and it also just tells her she may have misjudged you... you are not some friend zone mark after all.

In the case of the latter girls, some of them will be a little warmer/friendlier toward you, while others will be downright excited to hear from you and may even start chasing you via text message. You may find you’re quite surprised as what a switch a single high attainability flake can pull off.

Cure on the Friend Zone Date

Let’s say you didn’t pick up on the signs it was a friend zone date beforehand, or maybe she wasn’t too obvious about it... the date was easy for you to set up and she just went along with it.

But now she’s met up with you and suddenly you realize there’s zero attraction there. None. You’re looking at spending the next hour or two hours sitting with some person who is merely phoning it in with you, who’s met up with you because she’s resolved to talk to more strangers or try and rebuild her social life or because you asked and she was taught if someone asks nicely you ought to just go along with it.

What do you do?

Here are a few ground rules:

1. Don’t behave insecure. One of the things a lot of guys do if they realize they’re on a friend zone date is they start trying to qualify themselves, or they get self-conscious, nervous, and awkward. All this does is tell her you’ve bought into her frame of, “I am the desirable one and you are my male puppet.” If you clearly buy into it, she knows her frame is correct. If you do not buy into it, all she knows is that it might be correct.

   Even if you have some nice guy tendencies or you’re not used to deal with dates like this, remember it’s not so much what you feel on the inside as what you show on the outside that influences her reaction to you.

2. Focus on compliance. The game is to get her investing more than you. That means she’s doing physical things for you, like showing you her wrist tattoo or handing you the salt or scooting over on the booth to make room for you, and she’s doing verbal things like qualifying herself and flirting back with you when you flirt. If you can escalate compliance with her, you may cause her to begin viewing you as a more attractive man.

3. Use (physical) spontaneity. Platonic friends aren’t physically spontaneous with her. Business contacts aren’t physically spontaneous with her. But the kind of men she goes to bed with, these men are often physically spontaneous with her. Once you’ve escalated her compliance enough that she is following your lead, have her do something physically bold and spontaneous with you, like dance in the middle of the restaurant, leave the café to head to a dive bar for drinks, or go up on stage together to sing karaoke if you’re in a karaoke bar. The act of getting her physically doing something unexpected with you that she would normally only do with a lover can often trigger feelings in her of, “Hey, wait a minute... this guy is a lover for me, isn’t he?”
   

You’ll notice I didn’t say deep dive, or really get to know her, or chase frame her – these things work wonderfully with women who are already interested in you. With women who are not viewing you as a sexual candidate, however, deep diving just feels like a nice way for her to chat about herself to a stranger, while chase framing feels weird and incongruent. Instead, focus on escalating compliance, and particularly on getting to the point where you can execute physically spontaneous moves with her that are things she only does with lovers.

At that point, if you start getting the big doe eyes instead of her business peepers, you can begin to use deep diving and chase framing and all that other good stuff that shores up the connection and builds up the tension.

When to Hit the Eject Button

Sometimes it’s better just to bail outright on women who are not giving you enough.

Personally, if I flake on a girl once who seems like she’s treating me platonically, and then I follow up with her again and there’s little change, I will probably flake on her a second time or perhaps never even set up a date. Usually after a second bust with the same girl I will just lose any desire to contact her and instead devote my time to more promising prospects.

A funny thing often happens here in that some of these women (maybe half? I’ve never tracked it) suddenly start pinging you out of the blue anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks after your last contact... suddenly now they really want to meet up. Sometimes it’s an attempt to pick up where you left off: “Hey, what happened? Are we still going to get coffee?” Sometimes she just opts to reboot things from scratch: “Hey, you still in town? We should get a drink sometime.”

If it’s been a little while, I recommend you follow the sequence I have set up here:

“What to Do When She Gets Back in Touch”

As for ejecting on dates... If you make it onto a date, and the girl is simply not complying at all, and not showing any other signs of interest, I suggest you just pull the plug on it then and there. Just be polite and get up and say okay, it feels like this one is kind of off... we’re not really connecting. I don’t know why, there’s just not really any chemistry. I like you, but it doesn’t seem like that’s mutual really, so how’s about we call this one a day. The “I like you but it doesn’t seem like that’s mutual” line is important if you want to give her the chance to save things with you if she is in fact interested and just reserved.

If she protests, you can then ask her well, does that mean you like me and you want to keep spending time with me? If she says “yes”, then you immediately ask for compliance: okay, well, how about we move to the upstairs part of this café and grab a booth – we’ll get a change of scenery and try again. And then you just take her up there and sit close to her and get a lot more compliance.

Or if she agrees it isn’t mutual, then cool, you’ve saved yourself from throwing away any extra time on a woman it’s going nowhere fast with.

And now you can go meet a new girl whom you will hopefully not be dealing with a friend zone date with!

Oh, and if you’re following along, don’t worry; the alpha provider article will be up tomorrow.

Chase

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