(1) Beginner

Something that can be a great deal of fun to deploy when talking with some new girl is playful banter. You can quickly find yourself in a riveting, electrifying back and forth that leaves both you and her smiling and excited with this fresh new person you've each just met.

However, if you haven't spent as much developing your technique, playful banter can, instead of being a lot of fun, end up being downright headache-inducing. Pop the aspirin and break out the Alka-Seltzer -- you'll need it (or maybe she will).

And even if you have put time into building good wit, there's a good chance -- particularly if you're newer or even intermediate -- that you haven't learned the timing of using that wit and banter in a conversation with a new woman yet -- and that you may very well go over the top, or go for too long, straying into the land of the socially awkward or even calling up out-and-out auto-rejection via over-gaming, thereby costing yourself a girl who otherwise might've been yours.

For that reason, figuring out the rules of bantering properly ends up being quite important for your early game -- you're not always going to deploy your wit in full force with every young woman you meet, but you will with enough of them that having it honed more or less to a razor's edge can end up making the difference between making it to the mid-game with that new pretty girl you like, or having to bow out early.

Thus, this quick and dirty guide on getting down some of the basics of bantering playfully with women.

I tend to keep my focus on this site primarily to things that are as broadly applicable as possible -- things you can do no matter who you are or where you are in life to do better with women.

But the other day I had a reader write in asking about dating in college, and I thought the topic might be on worth getting a post up on. He writes:

“Dear Chase,

First off, terrific website. I haven't found anything on the web like the quality of articles you write and the depth you explore.

I'm 21 and I've finally finished university and I'm back at home. I recently got out of a 3 year relationship which lasted all the way through my time at college. A lot of the growing pains of being a young single and meeting girls has passed me by in this time. I've been on 2 dates in my whole life - both when I was 17 years old.

For a 21 year old guy, what is the best way of throwing myself into single life? Much of the dating advice out there seems aimed for an older audience than myself. It's unlikely I'm going to find girls my age doing the weekly grocery shop for example!

Thanks for any help!”

I shot him back a reply highlighting some of the things I'm going to touch on in this post, but I think there some advice here I can offer guys in college that'll help them meet more girls and succeed with more girls.

And if you're not in college, well, you might just want to give this one a read anyway -- a lot of the things I'm going to recommend you don't necessarily need an alma mater to pull off.

Why is it that most men can't seem to get what they want with women? How come so many men can't get a girl?

A few months back, a friend of mine asked me to author a post on leading women. I put it off for a while, because it's not as sexy a topic as, say, opening or locking in or overcoming objections or dating. Leading's just... a little vague, as far as topics go.

Yes, it's good to be an alpha male, and it's good to have a set process you follow, and to move on fast if a girl isn't following along. But how's that all come into play in a cohesive strategy for getting success with women?

If you'd like to achieve anything resembling consistent, reliable success with women, you're quickly going to realize that leaving things purely up to chance isn't going to cut it. "God helps those who help themselves," goes the saying -- which, boiled down, quite basically means that good things come to the people who go out and actively bring good things into their lives.

In other words, success comes to those who engineer that success.

But still, most folks don't bother engineering anything approximating success. Most average folks sit around waiting for success to find them. And it never does.

For success with women to start occuring for a guy, that has to change for him. So what's it take to advance an average man who can't get a girl into a man who consistently can?

Well, among other things, it takes this: he's got to be leading women.

Every guy's beaten himself up over how to ask out a girl he likes.

She's there, she looks great, you want to ask her out... so bad... but you just can't form the words. Or maybe even approach her in the first place.

Making the ask, as hard as it seems now, is, in fact, remarkably easy to do once you have a few simple tools to do it...

However, you can spend endless amounts of time stressed out over it when you don't.

So let's give you some AWESOME tips to making asking girls out SIMPLE.

Before we get to tips, a quick story.

When I was 14 years old, I asked a girl out for the first time.

I walked up to her in front of the whole school (her name was Sarah), and flat out asked her to go to the school dance at the end of the year with me.

She was the prettiest, most popular girl in school (not to mention head cheerleader), and she'd flirted with me and chased me hard for a year.

In fact, she'd asked me out about 6 months earlier (but I was too scared to say "yes")!

Yet by the time I finally asked her out, she'd given up on me -- the window had passed, and so had my shot with Sarah.

At the time I didn't know you only had a certain window of time to ask a girl out in... though I guessed something like that might be the case.

I soon found out it definitely was.

As you could've guess, Sarah said "no" to me, albeit in a very gracious way.

She told me she wanted "to be friends first", which I knew meant we weren't going to the dance together.

I never got a date with Sarah.

However, in the many years after, I eventually asked hundreds of girls out on dates. Some said no... but many more said yes.

And along the way, I've learned a thing or two about how to ask a girl out and get that "yes."

I've planned to write on how to ask girls out for a while now. However, a reader just wrote in asking about asking girls out specifically -- so, it's time to cover it. Our reader says:

“Man chase I really have been in a funk lately. I'm back in school and I feel like a social retard now lol! I need some advice, I really need help with asking girls out on dates and what that actually looks like you know? I'm reading your articles and a lot of it is making sense but closing the deal and getting dates is weird for me. I guess I really haven't actually asked a girl out on a proper date before my last GF I got with because I was able to escalate things with her fast.”

To answer our reader's question, I've put together this guide to asking women out.

This guide will teach you -- emphatically, unequivocally, and without fluff, huff, or pomp of any kind -- how to ask a girl out... and always (or almost always, anyway!) get a "yes."

About a day ago, we had a commentator on the post on how to become romantic who weighed in to let me know that it's silly to try and get better with people, and that most people have better things to do, and that in fact you really should just be yourself, and anyone who doesn't realize how awesome you are is simply intellectually stunted.

Where do people come up with this malarkey?

I know he represents a vanishingly small minority on this site -- and likely was just a passerby -- but this mentality represents the majority of the thought on the subject in mainstream society.

"Just be yourself. If people don't like you for who you are, who needs 'em?"

Quite likely one of the most counterproductive mindsets a man could possibly have. Anyway, I addressed that commentator's individual points pretty thoroughly in the comments section of that article itself, so I won't revisit it here, but I do want to talk about this mentality of "just be yourself" -- and why it's such terrible, terrible advice.

Unless you exclusively meet women by yourself, sooner or later you're going to have a buddy along with you when you meet a new girl or two. And what your buddy does -- and what you do -- can go a long way toward determining the outcome of that encounter.

There are, it seems, as many prescriptions out there on how to be a wingman as there are on how to become a millionaire, or how to get six-pack abs. But, you know me -- I don't tend to agree with too much of the advice that's out there. I usually find it overcomplicated and too "fancy."

Like, if you want great abs, you don't get the Super Ab Roller 3000 and start rubbing lotions on your stomach to melt away the fat. Instead, you just scale down the number of calories you're taking in and cut your carbs to drop the belly that's hiding your abs, and regularly hit the gym, go grab a bar above your head, and start lifting your knees up against your chest until your abs are on fire a couple times a week to build up your abdominals. Presto, great abs without magic machines or mysterious ointments.

Learning how to be a wingman is like that. You'll get all kinds of crazy advice out there -- some of which I'll highlight today, as examples of what not to do, before we get into what to do. But you'll be better off avoiding all that crazy advice, and instead sticking to what works.