(1) Beginner

It doesn’t matter how slick you look or how many great tips you’ve absorbed. Good basic social skills must come first if you wish for social success.

This is the first installment in a reboot of our old series on social skills.

Social skills are the single most crucial skill set for anyone to learn to work with other people.

We'll use dating as our vehicle to discuss these skills. Nevertheless, as you learn social skills in dating, you'll apply them to every area of your life too.

Social skills aren't deliberately taught. You don't learn them in school, except incidentally. Most people only intuitively understand social rules, and only once they've learned them.

People shun and shame those with insufficient social skills and grace.

However, you can develop these skills at any age; it just takes focus and practice.

In this series kick-off article, I'm going to show you just why social skills are so absolutely crucial.

There’s one reality on the glowing screens. There’s another one in the realm of the five senses. You can only live in one of them. Which one do you choose?

The other day I talked a bit about screens warping men's perceptions and making them think women all lust after men with giant muscles.

This is not the only way screens have been warping people's perceptions, however.

It is just the tip of the screenberg.

For some years I, like most people I suspect, had been held increasingly captive by the state of the world.

Popular revolts, widespread protests, political polarization, transnational saber-rattling, and of course, unprecedented government lockdowns resulting in a rolling back of civil liberties in a way unprecedented since the flowering of modern liberal democracy.

Not to mention masks everywhere, gym closures, nightlife closures... and a bizarre new dystopian system where the initiated gleefully compete to boast about their excellent compliance with the rules, even as they label and shun those who refuse to comply with the same facility.

In the midst of this cultural collapse/upheaval, I've talked to more and more people who've become much more apathetic about things they used to care about than they ever were before.

The decline of dating is only one example; it's a widespread one, and one I covered (along with the statistics to back it up) here.

Yet even I found myself slowly sinking into a tar pit of progressive apathy, transfixed by the state of apparent global chaos. When you wake up and check the state of affairs and it's one item of shrieking disastrous apocalyptic news after another, who has willpower enough to do anything worthwhile with the rest of his day?

But what happens when you don't wake up and check a bunch of things... but instead just live your life?

For a lot of guys, approaching women’s a chore. Yet if you can make it not a chore, but instead a good time, suddenly it gets easier to do and a lot easier to do WELL.

When a lot of guys start out trying to do pick up girls, they punish themselves.

It's a whole lot of:

• Being awkward
• Facing rejection
• Doing hard things
• Wallowing in failure

However, if you look at the guys who are good with girls, they're all having fun with it:

1. Some of them are playful types who enjoy teasing and flirting with women.

2. Some are physical types who enjoy touching or dancing with women.

3. Some are talkative types who enjoy having a rapt female audience for their stories, insights, or theories.

4. Some are tacticians who enjoy the tactical and strategic game of seduction.

A lot of newer and intermediate guys miss this, and never focus on trying to make seduction fun.

But it's an important point to get to with your courtships. Because if you can't make it a good time, sooner or later you'll burn yourself out.

If you can make it a good time though, it becomes easy to game for as long as you like.

Many guys think giant muscles are the key to getting laid. But are they? Do hulking muscles turn you into a babe magnet… or are their effects subtler and more nuanced than this?

We had a commentator asking me the other day why I don't talk about physique more.

He thought it was because maybe if I admitted that big muscles were really the key to getting laid, I'd have to close down Girls Chase and start selling supplements.

After all... who needs to learn game when you can just get ripped?

Once you've got gigantic muscles, beautiful women just chuck themselves at you. Don't they?

Well... not exactly.

But he's right, I should talk more about physique.

However, like many things here, I'm going to give you a perspective you probably won't get elsewhere.

I'm not going to tell you physique doesn't matter. But I'm also not going to tell you you need to be on gear, lifting hard at the gym 3 hours every day, eating raw steaks for lunch, getting your delts and traps as ridiculous as possible.

Instead I'm going to tell you something else.

Creepiness isn’t about how attractive you are. It’s about behavior. Creepy people behave in ways that set off alarms in others’ heads. Cool people don’t.

What is 'creepiness'?

How do you define it?

A lot of guys really dislike this term. There are all kinds of unfavorable definitions for it out there, such as "Creepy is just what a woman calls a man she does not find attractive."

But everyone's felt creeped out by someone at some point.

Even if you're a guy, I have no doubt you've felt creeped out. Whether by:

• Some shifty character you suspected was getting ready to mug you

• Some gay guy or transsexual you suspected wanted to get with you

• Some lonely individual tagging along with you or your friend group

... you've probably been creeped out by someone.

So what is this 'creepy feeling', exactly?

In the past, I've defined creepiness as being a result of someone hiding his true intentions (see: How to Not Be a Creepy Guy). However, today we'll go deeper still.

You see, there are certain rules that govern 'creepiness'.

The better you know them, the better you will be at not triggering the 'creepy switch'.

It’s normal to feel frustrated when you don’t get what you want. But rather than let yourself hate “the game”… why not just get good at the game instead?

On my article about your opinions about women betraying your success (or lack thereof) with women, a reader comments:

When it comes to bitterness it's usually not towards women as a whole. Sure some of the negative qualities of women can irritate me like not being consistent with their emotions/feelings/thoughts and their obliviousness in general. But I still have love for women and I always remind myself of this.

My bitterness is more directed towards the game and the dynamics of the sexual marketplace where women are buyers and men are sellers and to get attractive quality women men have to do a lot of work and grinding just to increase the probabilities of getting them. In addition to that they gotta deal with the bs society throws at them with their man shaming,masculinity draining tactics,"empowerment" of women which makes it harder for men to play their role as the aggressor,and makes women even more difficult to have as a ltr. Even if you become a high value man with good fundamentals you never ever really stop becoming a seller you just have a better product,but you still have to go around and market it and hope women like what you have to offer. You've probably heard the peasant/begger analogy before do you believe it's a bad comparison? I don't feel like a begger when I cold approach,but it's still not efficient. Even when you're good there will always be assymetric returns.

Personally I know I need to get better and I still approach women occasionally. Although when I do I fight a lot of internal resistance and always have this attitude of "sigh I need to go approach women because I don't currently have any and I need to be smooth and perfect as I do it or I will just get flaky numbers at best.

Coaches say that you need to enjoy the process and have fun with learning seduction and treat it like a game,but how do you have fun with it? How do you have fun with doing something you suck at doing,can be unpleasant and difficult at times and don't know when or it will payoff?

You could be turning your wheels for nothing and put all that effort only to end up having to settle for average looking women who don't fufill you.

It's a good comment. "I don't dislike women, but I do dislike the game," we might sum our reader's comment up as.

Of course, most everyone who's successful at anything learns to enjoy it.

I think we all know naturally that guys who have fun meeting girls tend to do a lot better at it than guys who do not.

The challenge is, before you're getting great results, how can doing this thing, which is nerve-wracking, that exposes you to rejection, that often sucks up time before producing any results, be enjoyable?

Many guys wish they could easily meet women as they go about their days without hesitation or fear. Well, you can, with the right strategy – however, it takes some short-term sacrifice.

The Holy Grail of game for a great many men is the ability to be 'always on'.

If you can reach that point, the thinking goes, then you can just meet women anytime, anyplace. You'll never freeze from approach anxiety or not know what to say.

The reality of course is that, excepting when you're on a 'run' with girls, you are pretty much always going to deal with at least a little approach anxiety.

However, it is absolutely possible to become a more social man, and integrate this into your day-to-day life... then mix in daytime approaches to women as a part of that.

If you can do it, you can turn yourself into that man who really truly does meet girls as he just goes about his day.