Insights from the Mind of a Seducer

What's the best way to pick up girls? You might be surprised by what can influence a woman's receptiveness... even something like being on birth control or not.

A fascinating study, "Relationship satisfaction and outcome in women who meet their partner while using oral contraception," was several days ago published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Researchers from the UK decided to look at the differences in women who began dating men while on birth control, and those who started dating men when they weren't on birth control.

What they found was this:

“Women who used OC scored lower on measures of sexual satisfaction and partner attraction, experienced increasing sexual dissatisfaction during the relationship, and were more likely to be the one to initiate an eventual separation if it occurred. However, the same women were more satisfied with their partner's paternal provision, and thus had longer relationships and were less likely to separate.”

In other words, using birth control (or oral contraception -- "OC") leads to women ending up with men they're less attracted to, are sexually dissatisfied with, increasingly become more sexually dissatisfied with as the relationship progresses, and the women more often are the ones to call the relationship off eventually. On the plus side, the men women on birth control end up with usually make better husbands and fathers, and their relationships lasted an average of two years longer.

The flip side of this is that women off birth control choose to mate and date with sexy men -- men they find more attractive, who give them better sex, and who they're less likely to initiate a breakup with -- but the breakups still happened, on average two years earlier than the men women met while on contraception. And it's more often the men doing the breaking up -- likely because these are more attractive men with more options with women who don't like staying tied down too long.

The reason for these huge differences in dating preferences -- why women on the pill are ending up with nice guys they're unsatisfied with but who make good dads, and why women off the pill end up with sexy guys they're excited by but who break up with them -- comes down to what the pill does chemically to women's brains -- and that works out to be some interesting stuff. Read on if you dare...

A man finds himself in conversation with a beautiful woman. Excited, and a little bit nervous, he starts to talk. And he talks more. And more. She can hardly get a word in edgewise.

He feels -- no, he knows -- that if he lets the conversation die down, just for a second, she's apt to get up and leave. So, instead, he decides he must run this conversation like a man possessed... he's got to keep it going himself. He's just got to.

And for a while he does.

Sooner or later though, eventually, he hits a moment where he finishes what he was saying and doesn't know what to say next. There's a pause; it's an awkward pause.

"Well," says the girl, "it was great talking to you. But I have to go find my friends now."

"Uh - okay," says the man. "Nice meeting you."

He never sees her again.

"Drat," he thinks to himself, immediately after she leaves, "if only I'd been able to keep the conversation running a little longer, until we were able to find something that was interesting to her. Then it all would've been okay."

I know this feeling -- I used to experience it myself all the time -- and I'd guess most guys reading this have probably felt it too. What it comes from, though, is a fundamental misconception about how a conversation with a new woman ought to run, and what that conversation is really all about -- and it also shows an inattention to using a very powerful conversational tool for getting things working in your favor: the pregnant pause.