We’ve discussed why if the aim is to sleep with or even
get into
relationships with women, you’re normally better off cultivating the
image of “great potential lover” rather than the image of “great
potential boyfriend” that the majority of men compete on (or, even
worse, “great potential friend”) a number of times here already.
If you’re just tuning in and could use a recap, these articles are the primary pieces on the subject:
What I want to discuss with you today is one of the key mentalities women have regarding men that you must take pains to steer clear of falling victim to: women’s “back pocket” mentality.
This is the habit of women to “collect” men and keep them in reserve – or, in their back pockets – until such time as they might need them.
It isn’t malicious. It’s not a conscious effort to be manipulative or use others (usually).
However, if you aren’t careful about it, you can let this tendency of women’s, coupled with the tendency most men have to “prove their salt as a boyfriend by making themselves totally available”, sabotage any chances you might’ve had with those women.
Sometime back, I shared an article about a fellow dubbed “Shopping Guy” by a girlfriend of mine. Shopping Guy was a male friend of my girlfriend’s who devoted a great deal of his personal time to waiting around for her and accompanying her out to shopping malls while she selected clothes to buy. He even did this while she was dating and sleeping with me (unbeknownst to him, needless to say).
The cautionary note there was that if you make yourself available for people to use, they will thank you for this, then use you for whatever you have made yourself available for.
Is there some chance that they realize your wonderful inner qualities and decide to sleep with or date you after some amount of time doing this? Sure.
Is that chance a very good one? Not remotely.
But guys do it because they don’t know any better way to get a shot at a girl, and have enough dead time to fill that the time sink of plowing large amounts of free time into low percentage chances at getting a girl doesn’t pain them too much. Sort of like the person who plays the lotto – chance he actually gets any substantial winnings is remote, but he doesn’t have a lot of other options for getting rich, and nothing better to do with his time than head over to the gas station and buy tickets, so... dare to dream, right?
Yet once you start improving yourself with women – upgrading your fundamentals, leveling up your game – this starts to seem like an increasingly raw deal to you.
Your opportunity cost of plowing tons of time into a woman who isn’t especially interested in you before you’ve even bedded her gets higher and higher as you’re increasingly able to meet equal or superior women to her and sleep with them quickly.
So, you begin to quit doing it.
However, your old feelings of value-exchange rules or sense of obligation to women may remain, and little bad habits of making yourself highly available to women linger on.
And that, my friend, is troublesome.
Tucked into Her Back Pocket
The average reasonably attractive woman has a not insignificant number of men offering their time, energy, and services to her in various capacities as she moves through life.
She learns when young that she can’t lean on these men too much, or they start to feel resentful if she doesn’t give them dates, kisses, or sex, which leads to melt downs, blow ups, and other unpleasantness.
Most younger women are shocked the first few times they run into this reaction from men – some guy bites her head off and tells her he’s done so much for her and how can she not appreciate it – and she feels betrayed. Here’s this guy she thought was her FRIEND! And now he’s trying to make her feel like she OWES him something... like what – a date? SEX???
Had he told her upfront that that was the deal – “Hey, look, I’m going to spend a few months plowing a lot of time into you, but at the end of that I expect we’ll sleep together,” she’d have said whoa, hey – no way! Keep your time!
He knew that wouldn’t fly though, so he tried the “obligation approach” – make her feel so damn obligated to you she won’t have any choice BUT to give you what you want!!!
Needless to say, this is rather sneaky (and pretty sketchy) behavior on his part. It isn’t because he’s a bad person though – it’s just because he doesn’t know how to be upfront about his interest in her and have it work out. Usually he has a history of asking girls out flatly and getting rejected. This time he figures he’ll take the “stealth approach”... only to become disillusioned and feel like the girl has siphoned away his time when this too doesn’t work.
Women who’ve gone through this once or twice – where some guy they were spending a lot of time with platonically suddenly snapped at them for not wanting to clamber up his flagpole – learn that having men in your life platonically is okay... you just can’t spend too much time on any one of them, is all.
So, they learn to keep a number of men around, whom they interact with more or less frequently depending on how “cool” the guy seems (i.e., the more he seems like an actual genuine friend, as opposed to some guy trying to sneak or obligate his way into her pants).
And sometimes they actually do date these back pocket guys! It’s rare, and infrequent, but... it happens.
More often, they tap into such men in times of need. Something bad or crazy happens, and they are able to ask such a guy for help, and he comes riding to the rescue. Almost every guy loves being the hero, especially to a pretty girl he finds attractive – heck, even if you’re damn good with women, you probably still get a kick out of this to some extent. It just feels rewarding.
Yet the key mentality through everything here is this: this guy and I are friends, and he’ll be there for me when I need him.
And that’s a mentality of hers you very much want to dash into a thousand pieces if you’re actually interested in dating or sleeping with a girl.
Women most easily and most commonly sleep with throwaway guys who don’t offer much value to their lives. We know this. They’re more careful with prospective boyfriends – who are valuable people to them, who must be carefully evaluated, and who must only be shown their best sides – and extremely careful with friends – who are far more valuable as friends and supporters and they wouldn’t want to mess that up by introducing sex into the equation (most women over the age of 23 or 24 have experienced how messy that makes things, either firsthand with their own friends they’ve slept with or by watching what happened with female friends of theirs who slept with platonic male buddies – most men do not handle this scenario well at all).
As such, a big part of being an asshole will often be communicating to her that you won’t be there for her.
You will not be her knight in shining armor.
If she needs someone to boost her self-esteem, or help her with this project she’s working on, or give her a ride to some event she wants to go to, tough luck – you ain’t the guy for that.
These are the things that get you labeled “asshole”, “bastard”, “bad boy”, “scoundrel”, “cad” – and help you end up in women’s beds as quickly as possible.
Why? Because you don’t fit into her back pocket.
There’s more to it than that, of course, covered here in various other articles and programs. But this is a part of it.
If you don’t go in the back pocket, she can’t use you that way. That takes you off the table for consideration in either friend or boyfriend roles.
Further, it makes you scarce – meaning she’s forced to decide if she wants you now, or is ready to let you go... potentially forever.
Staying Out of the Pocket
So how do you steer clear of that back pocket of hers?
Because you sure won’t be seeing a lot of action from there.
Communicating that you are scarce and that you are not boyfriend material are good, but not enough. You want to actively communicate that you don’t go into the back pocket, if at all possible.
How do you do this?
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Poke a little fun at back pocket guys. This one’s one of the easiest to do, but you want to be somewhat under-the-radar about it. If you’re too obviously contemptible towards these guys, it makes it look like you just broke free of being a back pocket guy yourself and are trying to show everyone how not-a-back-pocket-guy you are. Subtlety’s the order of the day.
One example would be noticing a guy and girl walking by carrying shopping bags – you might point them out to her and say, “Think he’s her boyfriend, or just some guy who follows her around holding her shopping bags hoping to score?”
Something to avoid: going too deep into psychology here. If you start talking about how some guys just really think the path to a woman’s panties is by doing stuff for her until she feels “obligated”, that’s too much – it sounds like you’ve studied this, or used to be one of these guys yourself. Which isn’t typically going to be sexy. Instead, just drop a remark about it and move on, and let that be sufficient – it will be.
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Refuse compliance requests. She wants to change tables? Let’s stay over here for now, it’s nicer. She wants to change plans and go to this party together instead of the one-on-one date you originally had planned? You’re not in much of a partying mood; why doesn’t she just go to that and you and her can do something else another time. She asks you if you can hold her bag? There’s a pole over there she can just hang it on for a minute if she has to fix her hair – women’s purses are great but they don’t really match your style.
Obviously don’t be a total dick about everything – if she wants you to pass the salt, just pass her the salt. But if she keeps asking you to pass her the salt, just tell her to leave the salt over on her side of the table, or summon the waiter over and ask for two saltshakers. You get the idea – any time it’s more than a 100% practical compliance request, or one that moves you closer on down the path toward the two of you sleeping together, just say no. You only have to decline a few silly requests like this for a girl to get the hint in a big way – and get turned on in a big way, too.
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Get lots of investment yourself. Similarly, you should be having her invest in you. Lots. As much as possible. Get her following your lead; get her saying yes to your requests; get her qualifying herself; get her doing things on your terms; get her investing. At first this’ll feel like you’re really forcing it, but after a while it becomes your default interaction style... you just get used to being accommodated. Which makes the women who want you purely for their back pockets burn with rage, and the women who want you for you burn with desire.
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Be skeptical of future offers. Women will make offers that seek to back pocket you sometimes – things like, “We should totally go rock climbing sometime!” Most guys jump at this – jump right into the back pocket, that is. Instead, you just want to be skeptical (unless it’s role-playing future projection, which is okay; OR if you’re the one making offers about the future, rather than her): “Haha, climbing up a big pile of rocks isn’t exactly my idea of fun,” or maybe launch into a chase frame: “You know, we only just met and already you’re talking about climbing my rocks. I like your style, girl.”
Whatever you do here, don’t agree – not even with a “yeah, maybe” or anything similar. The important thing here is not letting her get a foot in the back pocket door – that’s it.
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Avoid being super social. If you meet her when she’s with her friends, it’s kind of unavoidable and you must be a little social. However, you don’t want to seem like you hit it off with her friends so much that now they want to hang or party with you again. Do this, and you’re instantly back pocketed. If her friends are around, be friendly and sociable enough that they like you and think well of you, but don’t take it so far that they’re begging her to make sure you’re at the next party they’re throwing for the circle.
Keep in mind that the focus here is demonstration, not proclamation.
You’re not telling her, “I’m not really the kind of guy who does a lot of things for women I’m not sleeping with,” because the very fact that you have to say it makes her think it probably isn’t true (and, truth be told, if you’re saying instead of showing it probably isn’t).
Rather, you are showing her, through your actions and behavior, that you are not someone to be relied upon for being a dutiful inhabitant of her back pocket.
Instead, you are someone with very specific value to her (ideally, sexual value), and no further value. So, she may choose to indulge herself in that value, or she may choose not to, but there’s no sticking you in her back pocket to make up her mind about you later, because you won’t fit in that pocket and chances are will be moved on before she can even start trying to squeeze you in there.
A Matter of Terrific Urgency
One cool final thing on steering clear of the back pocket is the fact that when you do so, you foster urgency.
Not being in her back pocket makes you immediately scarce, because she never gets to feel like she “has” you.
Obviously, if you aren’t someone she’s attracted to, she’ll just shrug and move on. Who cares about losing someone they aren’t all that interested in?
But if she IS interested in you, and you haven’t made yourself so hard to get that you killed your attainability and put her into auto-rejection at some point, she’ll feel compelled to move fast with you so as not to lose you back into the mists from which she first discovered you.
Women tuck men into their back pockets because doing so makes them feel more secure. It’s just nice being able to fish a guy out of there whenever you need him for whatever it is he does for you and that you need from him.
When a woman figures out that you are not one of these back pocket guys she can fold up and slip away for when she needs him, you become a lot more valuable.
Think of a video game you might’ve played that had power-ups you could collect and hold onto to use when you wanted, and power-ups you could only use right at the moment you found them – use them or lose them. Which kind always felt more valuable to you?
Always the ones you could only use then and there, right? Because they are scarcer, and because they are not in your control. You can’t stick them in your back pocket and use them when you need them – you can only use them now, or never.
That’s what you must be. When you’re a use-him-or-lose-him kind of guy, women just naturally want to use you a whole lot more – and they want to use you in ways that are a lot more inline with how you want to be used (not to mention kinder to your time, energy, and effort) than how most men are used around them.
Ciao,
Chase
READ NEXT: “Back Pocket Mentality, Pt. II: The Holding Pattern”
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