One of the things I always look to guide men out of doing, whether I’m coaching them in-person or advising them via phone or Internet or just writing stuff for them to read, is being the entertainer. I touched on this a bit in Acting With Intent and Faux Pas of the Sociaux Nouveaux, and I really ought to write a proper post devoted mostly to this, but the problem in a nutshell with being the entertainer is that you get a lot of false positives.
After a long break from facial hair, I decided last fall to begin sporting some again. I hadn’t had any since I’d shaved off my moustache and goatee back in 2004. This time though, at the end of 2009, I grew a chinstrap and a soul patch. And I noticed an immediate changed in the level of attraction I got from women.
Asian girls from Asia, I noticed, apparently had preferred me clean-shaven, and their attraction for me went down a bit once I began sporting facial hair. But white girls, on the other hand – whoa. Dramatic increase in attraction there. My approach toward them hadn’t changed. My style hadn’t changed. My voice hadn’t changed. But the level of attraction I got from them after growing a little facial hair – that changed over night.
Back when I first got into learning to get better with girls, one of the things I recall really struggling with was communicating to women I was interested in them.
As I watch most newer guys, they seem to consistently have as much difficulty with this concept as I used to. There’s one of two ways it usually goes with guys who struggle with this:
Here’s a short, powerful tip for getting girls feeling both attracted and special around you in a hurry: tell them you’re picky. Tell them you’re very picky – but you like them. And then have some valid reasons for why (them being beautiful does not count – there are a lot of beautiful women in the world!).
I picked this up originally from women I dated; it seems like every girl I date tells me she’s picky at some point or another. I’m not sure if that’s because I actually date mostly picky women, or if they just like to tell me that because they can tell I myself am picky. Regardless, it’s something I started telling women too: that I am picky.
One of the most enervating, life-sucking situations you can find yourself in is that of the relationship that’s slowly circling the drain. If you’ve had a relationship die a slow death before, you know what I mean – the sad, slow withdraw of good feelings in synchrony with the gradual build up of resentment and frustration and desperation.
The problem with a relationship fading out this way is it can creep up on you so slowly and under-the-radar that you don’t realize it’s happening until the little relationship snowball rolling downhill starts taking out trees, rocks, and ski lodges.
Every time I hear of other men’s efforts to get intimate with women they’ve brought home, they seem to have these elaborate places filled with all forms of entertainment and ways of engaging women and things to occupy them and give them something to do.
Guys bring girls home and get them playing Nintendo Wii together. Or they play some game like Jenga (I remember when this was a big craze on the West Coast a year back or so – any guy who wanted to be successful with women had to get a Jenga!). And then, presumably after beating their date at a few rounds of Wii Sports, they make their move and go to get intimate.
To me, this has always seemed like a lot of work. Early on, I had travel souvenirs that I would show to girls; but even then, I’d dive right into getting physical with them as quickly as possible. I noticed soon into my seduction career that the longer I took to get physical with women, the more awkward tension there was with them and the less sexual tension there was with them. The more time taken, the more awkwardness generated.
Had a discussion with a friend of mine the other day where he asked me if I ever got the scenario of walking up to a girl, engaging her, and having her blankly stare at me and not respond. He asked because he wondered what it meant – in other words, what he might be doing wrong.
And it touched on something I’d been thinking about recently: on how perceptions of “rejection” change as your understanding of women evolves.
Five years ago, I took any form of non-engagement by a girl I’d started speaking to as a deep, personal rejection. It was as though she had assessed my person and found me unworthy. I felt hurt and insulted.
Nowadays, I recognize that reaction I used to have for what it was: a combination of a lack of understanding of women, and a lack of any kind of abundance mentality. Because the world is not so simple as I assumed it was back then.
Some guys are just jerks. And they’re fine with that. They think it’s the right way to get girls – it’s far better than being a nice guy, they’ll tell you. And who can argue with that? Nice guys finish last.
Me? I almost lost the most amazing woman of my life thus far before I ever got her because I was a jerk.
A little over four years ago, I pulled a really thoughtless, jerk move on my first date with a girl I really liked. It’s not important what I did, though I should note that at the time, it felt relatively minor to me, but it was major to her, and as a result, she completely cut me off following it. No answers to my phone calls or texts. No emails. No nothing. The only way I turned it around was because we were already heading off overseas on the same tour, and I put in a Herculean effort there abroad to turn things around with her.
This is one of those things that, when I figured it out, kinda made me slap my forehead and go, “Duh.” But even still, it took me five years to figure it out. And I’m going to give it to you in one post.
You’re welcome ;)
I figured it out gradually as I realized a number of things:
What do you do when she says, “I love you?” Do you run and hide, or say it too?
There are two near-universal responses to a woman saying those three little words, and they’re pretty much both absolutely horrible and flat out wrong from the standpoint of achieving anything good and healthy in a relationship. They are:
