(1) Beginner

After approaching women for 15 years (and succeeding with many of them), Alek Rolstad shares his biggest takeaways on opening girls & hooking them in.

Hey guys. Welcome back.

In today’s post, I want to freestyle and share my thoughts on opening and hooking. These reflections come from 15 years of night gaming, so they are well-founded.

I will discuss opening, hooking, the three-second rule (whether you should wait before opening or jump into it), and if you should use canned (scripted) openers.

So, keep reading. You will likely learn a few techniques you haven’t thought about.

Too caught up in interview-style questions? Break yourself out of that pattern by turning your questions into statements!

One of the most common rookie mistakes men make in conversation is to ask too many questions.

When you’re talking to a girl you’ve just met and you BOMBARD her with questions, it makes her feel like she’s in an interview. That’s bad for a multitude of reasons:

• Interview-style is not how she talks with close friends. When you hit her with question after question, she gets the feeling that, “This man and I aren’t close.”

• Interview-style displays a lack of connection. When there’s connection, you and her just vibe, with minimal questions. If you have to keep asking each other questions, the connection isn’t there.

• Interview-style is more effortful. You are in ‘topical search mode’, looking for something to connect with her on. If you need to explore topic, after topic, after topic, that is a lot of work. You are in violation of the Law of Least Effort, and look socially weak.

You definitely do not want to overdo it with the questions.

So what CAN you do? Turn some of those questions into statements!

Friction occurs in every complex system. If you want to date and socialize effectively, you must be able to identify it – and then adjust your response!

Every time you go out to socialize, message an acquaintance, or flirt with a romantic prospect, you have some goal in mind. Even if it’s only half-formed, rattling around in the back of your head, there’s still an object you’d like to achieve.

Sometimes everything goes smoothly and you meet your objective without even thinking about it. Your socializing nets you cool new friends. Your acquaintance messages back inviting you to a party. You seamlessly seduce that romantic prospect into a romantic conquest. When this happens you can feel like you’re walking on air.

Yet things don’t always progress as smoothly as you’d like. You go out to socialize but it suddenly pours rain; you discover you’re the only one out. You message that acquaintance only to get back a skeptical reply – or no reply at all. You flirt with a romantic prospect, but your prospect replies in a platonic way.

When things don’t go as planned, that’s friction. Friction is anything that impedes progress to your goal. Like friction in a physical system, it slows you down, increasing the amount of effort you must put in to push ahead, possibly even stopping you from getting there entirely.

Expert socializers come to have an innate sense of the social friction they’re facing, how to avoid it, deal with it, overcome it, or, alternately, when to take friction as an indication that a certain social objective isn’t worth it or won’t be achievable and that it’s time to change objectives.

In this series, we’ll take a close look at social friction: what causes it, how it manifests, and the most effective ways to deal with it.

Today, in Part 1, I’ll spell out exactly what friction is when it comes to social and romantic endeavors.

Pointing at yourself or others as you set emotional frames anchors those emotions to the pointee. Can you use this in seduction? You absolutely can…

A recent study examined US President Donald Trump’s use of pointing to connect with his audience. The study authors note

Results show that (i) inward points are associated with first-person references; (ii) outward points are associated with second person and third person/object references; (iii) downward points are associated with locative expressions; (iv) looping marks plurality and inclusiveness and (v) internal complexity is associated with expressions of number, time, sequence and comparison.

The authors further note that “Trump uses pointing in the kinesic performance of right-wing populism to entertain his audience, to engage with them more directly, to steer their attention and to align himself with them as a man of the people.”

While academia may just be catching up, the use of pointing has been with us since before we were human (apes, for instance, are known to point).

And one place we’ve long paid attention to the usefulness of the point is in neurolinguistics programming.

You want women in your life but you can’t get off the couch. Are you lazy? Or are you just not doing what’s needed to MOTIVATE yourself to pick up girls?

We get guys periodically asking for help solving motivation issues around approaching and picking up women. Not the least of these being Sub-Zero, our long-time commenter who has long struggled with drive issues. Here’s a recent comment by him on the subject:

Actually getting some drive back, but still don’t have the drive to deal with everything that comes with the ups and downs of dating. I’m horny all the time and when I’m sleeping with women I’m always pleasing them, so I know that’s not the issue. I just don’t have the drive to keep going if things aren’t working out and quit. It makes me wonder how other guys can have no kind of success and can keep doing it. How do I get the drive to keep practicing and getting better instead of quitting?

All right then. Let’s talk about motivation.

I’ll see if I can come at it from a different angle than our many other articles on the subject.

First off, a couple of points:

1. This article is not a “you should be doing this” moral lecture. If you aren’t driven to approach or pick up girls, and you don’t want to be, that is fine. This guide is a tool, not  an order.

2. This article is also not a mandatory thing you have to follow even if you want to pick up. If you want to pick up girls, but just occasionally, and are happy with how it’s going, stick with it.

This article is for men who want MORE motivation to go out and approach more women but are struggling to find that motivation.

In other words, this is the article for men motivated to find the motivation to go out and pick up girls. Copy that?

If a girl’s not investing as much, you may be tempted to feign disinterest. But all too often this technique is see-through. Here’s what to do instead.

It’s a pretty common strategy for guys who are learning to do better with girls to try to feign disinterest in them.

After all, you figure out pretty quick that there’s a whole power balance that occurs during the courtship dance. Show too much interest, your attainability goes too high, she feels like she’s “got you already”, then her interest in you drops to zero.

So it’d make sense to try to reduce how much interest you’re showing by feigning actual disinterest – you’d think.

But as you’re about to see, feigning disinterest much of the time is not going to work out the way you hope it will.

Instead, all too often, it backfires.

When you’re an incel, it’s like being stuck in a deep, dark hole. If you’re ready to climb out of that hole, here is how to stop being an incel – seriously.

There’s not a lot of help for drowning men.

When men struggle, the world leaves them behind.

It’s different for women. We protect and coddle women. Women are precious. They birth the next generation and raise them.

But men are replaceable. One guy ain’t getting the job done? Switch him out and put another one in his place.

Meantime, the men who don’t make the cut slip down through the cracks. They slide down into blackness and despair, perhaps never to rise again.

That’s where I came from, a long ways back. I was a man trapped in benighted helplessness, chained to my own misery, alone, forgotten by the world. For a decade, I drifted by myself in a black sea of anguish, each day a walking nightmare of pointlessly going through purpose-devoid motions in my out-in-public isolation.

Today, of course, I walk a different path. I have been with innumerable women, many of them beautiful, many of them amazing. I’ve bedded models, had relationships with gorgeous architects, economists, and the daughter of a South American politician, and am used to being chased after by women for whatever I want with them. I have awesome friends and more cool social contacts than I know what to do with. I also happen to run the largest men’s dating advice website in history, GirlsChase.com, which over the past 17 years has been honored with 64 million visitors, and served a humbling 14,000 customers. We’ve had thousands of men tell us how meaningful our advice has been and what an impact it’s made on them – more than a few insisting that we’ll never know how much it’s helped them.

This guide on how to stop being an incel is for those men out there who are, like I was all those years ago, trapped in a celibacy they’d tear their eyeballs out to be out of. It is a guide I suspect only I can write – because after having spent so much time on either side of the coin, I know well both how despairing it is to be the man deep in the hole, and how maddeningly futile it can be to be the one trying to reach down and pull him out of it.

Before we begin, to put off the guys who are suspicious – yes, Girls Chase is a commercial site; no, I do not sell anything in this article. As a matter of fact, if you are an incel, I am going to suggest you do NOT do most of what is on this website (cold approach pickup), and that you do not buy any of our products or anyone else’s. At least not yet. Perhaps in a year or two. I’ll tell you why when we get to that.

First though, let me tell you a bit about me.