Why Won't Women Just Say What They Want?

Women use ambiguity for three (3) reasons: to expose a man’s true colors, to retain room to maneuver, and to preserve their social reputations.

Maybe an hour ago, I finished reviewing a lesson from The Dating Artisan, part of my upcoming master class on succeeding with women. For each of these videos, I have to review once to make sure there’s nothing that snuck in we should edit out (our DoP’s toes sneaking into the frame have been a constant annoyance), as well as to add text and citations I want added. Then I have to review the final video a second time to make sure everything checks out. Each of these videos is around 50 minutes long on average, and there are about 50 of them... so you can imagine why it’s taking me so long (that, and that we still need to build the site / file delivery system / etc. for this thing).

Anyway, at multiple points in this lesson, our actress on the shoot claims she would not like if a guy did something to her I described (in the case I’ll tell you about, it was slapping a naughty girl on the butt). Meanwhile, even as she claims this, she laughs and becomes excited and flirtatious. At one point I highlight this and say, “She’s saying ‘no’, but at some point with a guy she likes, it’s going to be ‘yes’.” If you’re at all good at reading women’s signals, it’s pretty obvious when viewing the clip how the idea affects her. Not only does she get excited in the moment, but her flirting and laughter dial up dramatically after this incident for the rest of the lesson.

If you’re an old pro, you see a situation like this and grin and go, “Yeah... girls!” You love it. It’s fun. It’s a big part of what makes the whole thing exciting.

But if you’re not so good with girls yet, this is likely to be a point of major frustration for you. “Why the living bleeding hell won’t women just say what they want?”

Because sometimes they do.

But other times they don’t.

Sometimes they say exactly what they want. Sometimes they say the opposite of what they want.

How the heck is a guy who’s not good with women yet supposed to decipher all this?

The Female Strategy to Obfuscate and Confuse

A 2000 study on nonverbal courtship behavior put young men and women alone in a room, in a natural setting (they were supposed to be in a joint interview, but the interviewer ‘unexpectedly’ had to leave the room for a phone call – leaving the guy and girl alone), and observed their behavior.

They found women were deliberately ambiguous about their levels of interest in men, and employed three (3) strategies to affect this ambiguity:

1. The Poker Face Strategy: when one hides one’s intentions.

2. The KGB Strategy: when one uses tactical deception and misinformation.

3. The Protean Strategy: when one uses ‘adaptive unpredictability’; that is, an ever-changing, unpredictable set of behavior.

Why do women use these strategies? From the paper:

“Sabini and Silver (1982) postulated that the essence of initial opposite-sexed encounters is the creation of ambiguity, where both sexes tend to hide their goals and reveal information about possible commitment slowly. Such a situation entails the “communication paradox” (Grammer, Fieder, & Filova, 1997) where intentions have to be communicated without actually revealing these intentions.”

When men and women meet, both sides conceal their objectives, and reveal these only slowly. She can’t reveal too much because you haven’t revealed too much. But even if you do reveal a lot, she has no way to know if what you reveal is the truth – or if it’s just a clever deception. Further, even if she believes what you’ve revealed is ‘true’, she may not feel the same way... or she may view it as an opportunity to negotiate a better deal for herself, since now she has the leverage: she knows what you want and what you’re all about, but you have no idea if she’s on the same page.

Plus, you know, women can change their minds. So even if she tells you what she wants, she may not still want that 10 minutes from now.

The researchers note some curious findings:

• Men are more interested in women than women are in men, on average

• Women exert more active control over male behavior than the reverse: women provide the signals, after which men talk. Women evaluate what men have to say, and provide more signals (either positive [green light] or negative [yellow light or red light])

• Men make more verbal revelations than women do: men spend more time trying to prove themselves to women than women spend trying to prove themselves to men

• Women take control by sending subtle signals

• Women use solicitation signals (i.e., approach invitations) regardless whether they report being interested in the guy or not

• Women with both high and low interest in a man send the same amount of solicitation signals to him. The difference comes in the second stage of the courtship, past the opening period, at which point uninterested women drop off in the signals they send, while interested women continue to signal

• Women who are not interested do not send clear rejection signals; the researchers even find that, “In fact, women show affirmation, engage in verbal exchange, and send sexually explicit signals [even] without having much interest in the man.”

• Negative signals from women have no strong correlation with interest (i.e., if she’s giving you negative signs, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t like you). Instead, negative signals are tied to how much talking you do – the more you talk, the more likely you are to encounter negative signals from her later. Women use negative signals to say “Hey buddy, you’re talking too much and/or saying things I don’t agree with.”
  

The goal of women’s controlling the conversation with their signals, the researchers believed, was to elicit information from the man in order to make a decision.

Now, here’s a really interesting part of this research.

What the researchers discovered was that first impressions are made very quickly, and those impressions are usually very accurate. There is a high correlation between a woman’s behavior in the opening phase and the follow-up phase of the courtship. The deception a woman is trying to avoid is not “I don’t know if this guy’s the kind of guy I want or not” but, rather, “I think this guy’s the kind of guy I want – but I need to confirm this, so I need to make it hard for him to trick me while I figure this out.” Thus, her ambiguity; she uses this to make it hard for you to get a fix on her.

If you can’t get a fix on her, you can’t tell her what she wants to hear, since you don’t know; your best bet is to just show her your true self, and let her judge on her own whether the real you is a man she wants.

Put another way, attraction is either there or it isn’t (guys have been asking for more clarity on this point in the Girls Chase comments sections; well, here you are). The rest of the courtship is about her making sure that initial attraction she felt was on-point, and her getting comfortable enough with her judgment to allow you to become intimate.

Goal #1: Reveal a Guy’s True Stripes

You’re a great guy and you’d never lie to a girl or deceive her.

You know that. She doesn’t know that. You’ve just met, after all.

Further, if you’ve ever had someone do something slimy to you after knowing this person for years, you know how slippery people can be. Even if you think you know someone, some folks have only shown you a side of themselves, and not the whole picture.

The way a woman gets the whole picture (or at least, more of the picture) from you? Don’t let you know what she wants.

It’s annoying, it’s frustrating, it’s maddening... I know.

But why is it annoying, frustrating, maddening that women won’t just say what they mean?

Because you aren’t sure what to do. Because if she acted consistently in one way, you could say, “Okay, I just need to do this, tell her that, and act this way.” And if she acted consistently in another way, you could say, “All right. I need to do that, tell her this, and act that way.”

However, if her goal is not show this guy how to get me but instead see who this guy truly is, it doesn’t profit her to turn on the runway lights for you to come in for a landing. Instead, she is evaluating you, and because she is evaluating you, she wants you showing her who you are, not adjusting yourself to better date or sleep with her.

“I lost my beard in a freak typewriter accident.”

This is a big part of why women test. It’s a part of the evaluation process.

Women use the same behavior in relationships to stress test the health of their relationships and see where the guy’s head’s at. If she’s nice and calm and predictable you can just tell her what she wants to hear, even if the truth is your money’s dried up, you’ve built a secret harem of five other women, and you’ve decided you don’t love this girl anymore.

“I’d never do that, Chase!” Sure, yeah. Easy to say. Can’t tell you how many men I’ve seen in relationships though who privately tell me, “I’ll never marry this girl,” while with the girl herself they behave in an ambiguous way. Because, of course, if they flat out tell her, “I’ll never marry you, babe,” they fear she’ll leave. Or men who have become less happy with a girlfriend, but they hide it from her, rather than tell her, “Hey, I’m not as happy with you these days. I think I’m falling out of love with you.”

Most men will never tell a woman this. The only way for her to find out if the terrain has changed is to go ambiguous, be unpredictable, and test.

Guys who don’t like it don’t like it because they’re forced to expose their true selves to a woman’s evaluation.

But mating is all about evaluation. You evaluate her, and she evaluates you. If you both favorably evaluate the other, you have sex.

If you’re not able to pass women’s evaluations yet, well, don’t worry. You’ve got a million things you can improve to get you there (and you don’t need to do them all. Just pick the ones that appeal to you most – or, even better, appeal to the type of girl you want most – and level those up first).

Goal #2: Give Herself Room to Maneuver

The second objective of ambiguity is to give a woman space to maneuver where needed.

As the researchers note, women put out “Come talk to me” signals rather liberally when one-on-one with a man, regardless whether they’re interested in the man or not.

If you’ve ever seen a man one-on-one with a woman who ignored him, you might begin to understand why. Men get angry when women completely ignore them. Yet we know from other research anger increases men’s risk taking. A woman you haven’t communicated with is one you’re more likely to ‘other’, too (i.e., see as “not like me at all”, which reduces compassion and empathy). There are real risk factors there for the woman who wounds a man’s ego.

There’s also more to gain for a woman in roping this guy she isn’t into in. He could become a friend, a supporter, or another important contact. He might be able to introduce her to people. If she finds herself in a bad situation and he’s nearby, he’s a lot more likely to help her out if he feels like they have a bit of a connection already.

So she uses these signals to get the man talking to her, but whether she wants things to proceed to a greater level of intimacy or not you often won’t know at the outset. If she doesn’t, she’ll simply dial down her signals, while not giving you a clear ‘rejection’ signal (remember, she doesn’t want to make you angry and endanger herself, and she also doesn’t want you to ‘other’ her, and risk not being able to call on you in a time of need).

The result for most guys is when the signals dry up they just feel like they’ve blown it. When in fact the case may be she was just doing the sociable woman thing, and was never actually interested to begin with. Remember: look for results, not reactions.

It’s not about “does she keep signaling me” (although I guess according to this research, to a certain extent it is. Women cut back on their signals after a time with men they don’t much want). More pointedly, it’s about what will she do with me. Do I get results. Or does she just flirt.

This is a woman using her maneuverability. If she kicked things off by making it clear she really liked a guy, then either changed her mind later (i.e., if she decides her first, attracted impression of you was wrong) or wasn’t ever actually interested (i.e., if she was being social just to be social, not because she wanted to jump in bed with you), it’s going to be very hard for her to get this guy to cool off later.

Instead, with ambiguity, she preserves maneuverability.

If she likes, at any time, she can stop signaling this guy... And instead of him being angry or offended or othering her, he’ll just be confused. “What happened?” he’ll wonder. “I thought she liked me!”

Confusion is a far more useful emotion for him to be in than anger (or auto-rejection). She can circle back to a confused man and rope him back in if she chooses to later (see my article on back pocket mentality). Or she can just walk away, without him becoming pushy or aggressive – he’s too busy attempting to decipher what happened for him to feel indignant or entitled.

Goal #3: Preserve Her Social Reputation

Women’s reputations are everything to them. If they become ostracized from the group, they’re done.

For a man, the worst reputation hits all center on his masculine value:

• He’s a coward
• He’s a turncoat
• He’s weak
  

For a woman, they center on her romantic/sexual value:

• She’s a slut
• She’s a cheater
• She’s easy
  

A man can be easy and still get high caliber women. It may make it harder for him in some circumstances, but it won’t usually cripple him.

Yet for a woman, such a reputation can be deadly. Men in her circle will dismiss her as a mate, regardless how pretty she is. When they choose for a relationship, guys will pick the cute girl who’s loyal and hard to get over the gorgeous girl who’s slept with all their friends almost every time.

Didn’t anyone tell these girls the past doesn’t matter?

Further, because who’s had sex with whom often isn’t public information, what people end up evaluating most is behavior over facts. You may have seen this in your own circles – there might be a girl you know has hooked up with lots of guys, but she behaves in just the sweetest, cutest, most demure way, and top guys in the circle can’t help but want to date her. Or there might be a girl who’s actually only had sex with a couple of people, but she behaves really wild and talks about sex freely and openly and guys don’t want a relationship with her.

Facts don’t matter. Presentation matters.

Now, the problem is that if she behaves too asexual, men just won’t bother with her at all. Men pay more attention to women who flirt, and they feel more attraction to them, too. If she goes full-on asexual, she’ll have to live in a romantic-sexual desert, where she watches other girls not as good as herself date the men she wishes she could have had.

The solution, as you might imagine, is ambiguity. She’ll act interested... but you’re not sure. Maybe she is. Maybe she isn’t. She’ll do things that don’t match what you expect her to do, and behave in an unpredictable way.

The result is that to an outside observer, all he’ll be able to say is, “I think, maybe she is... But I don’t really know for certain.”

The worst she can be accused of is being a flirt. And indeed, the most flirtatious women will even tell you: “I love to flirt.”

Which is just another way of being ambiguous. It’s her saying “I enjoy the act of flirting itself”, which forces you to wonder “So does that mean her flirting leads to hooking up, or it’s just something she does for the heck of it?”

The answer of course, is “Yes to both” – sometimes her flirting leads to hook ups, but sometimes it’s for fun.

Women aren’t just vague and unpredictable as a ruse. They, by their very natures, are to some extent unpredictable.

Turn About is Fair Play

If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you know of course I recommend men do to women a lot of the same things women do to men.

I suggest you deep dive women and find out what they value. That gets the woman doing the verbal communication, while you provide the nonverbal signals and urge her to continue (or not). I suggest you chase frame and use sexual innuendo to put flirty mixed signals out there that get her thinking about hooking up with you... without knowing for sure if that’s what you want with her, or if you’re just a big flirt. I advise you to flirt with girls, be playful, and tease them, for the same reasons.

All these things put women in that same intrigued, excited, confused state, where they don’t know exactly what you’re after, but they’re hoping more and more that it’s something substantial.

Of course, if you’re uncertain what she wants and she’s uncertain what you want, the courtship still must move forward. Otherwise it’ll be two people flirting and wondering until they at last part ways. Thus, you need to touch her; you need to move her; you need to take a phone number from her and set up a date with her. Eventually, you need to invite her home, kiss her, undress her, and sleep with her.

The most workable solution for (most) men is thus verbal ambiguity plus physical and logistical escalation. She’s never able to get a bead on you verbally (and thus, is forced to show you more and more of her real self – which lets you screen and qualify her, just as she does with you), but she becomes more and more excited as the courtship builds momentum and makes real steps forward. “I don’t know if he really does want me... But things are moving forward! Oh, I hope, I hope...” That’s what you want her to think and feel.

Women will almost never tell you directly what they want, at least not in leveraged ‘negotiations’, like what that initial courtship period is. Telling you directly what they want allows you to conceal your true nature from them, removes their room to maneuver, and puts them at elevated social risk.

The way to move past women’s vague, ambiguous natures is to be flirty and ambiguous yourself – while, all the while, you use compliance tests, physical escalation (touch her more and more intimately as the courtship progresses), and logistical escalation (move from standing, to seated, to a different venue, to back to your place or back to her place, to bed, to sex) to move things ever forward.

This lets you screen out the girls who weren’t actually interested and were just being social from the girls who are indeed interested, and who hoped you’d lead things forward.

If that’s a lot to remember, just remember it like this:

1. Be flirtatious but ambiguous in your words (i.e., let her suspect, but don’t let her know)

2. Move things forward with touch (start with incidental and work your way up)

3. Move things forward with logistics (approach her, then move her, then isolate her, etc.)

The girls who aren’t into you will screen themselves out, while the ones who are will stay on... all the way to the bedroom.

Try not to resent women for their tendency toward ambiguity.

It’s a big, scary world out there for girls. Ambiguity is like an invisibility cloak that helps them stay safe.

Your job isn’t to coax them out of the invisible cloak, by the way.

It’s to get them to go on a date with you, come home with you, or hop into bed with you and not care if it’s on. “Sure, wear your invisibility cloak if it makes you safer. But hey, let’s go get a bite to eat while you do.”

Chase Amante