(1) Beginner

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.

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.

If you’ve ever looked at a pretty girl and suddenly felt a surge of nervousness at the idea of going to say hi to her, you’ll get something out of this article. Because what you were doing when you felt that nervousness was you weren’t thinking in numbers.

Most men who are successful with women have a number of similar traits you can distill and learn from. One of those traits is thinking in numbers. That is to say, thinking to themselves not, “I’m going to go meet that girl… I hope she likes me!” but rather, “I’m going to go meet every cute girl I see, until I find one who likes me.”

When a lot of guys plan dates, they seem to plan them with an attempt to address one specific concern:

How can I make this date fun?

The fear seems to be that if the date isn’t fun, a girl won’t want to go. And how can you move things forward with a girl who doesn’t want to go out with you?

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out and plan “fun” dates early on in my seduction career. I tried to be inventive, and innovative, and come up with engaging, exciting activities that my dates would not have experienced before.

Getting investment from women is a crucial element of your success with them. Men who fail to get investment fail to move things forward with the women in their lives – it’s as simple as that. Investment is vital.

So what happens when you ask for compliance and get a “no”? What happens when you say, “Come with me,” and she just shakes her head and stays put?

A common response from a lot of guys is they back down; they retreat from their compliance requests or compliance demands, and forget about it. The following scenario is typical in a number of guys’ interactions:

“Abundance Mentality” is something that’s frequently prescribed as an answer to men’s neediness issues: approach anxiety, having a “weird” or “awkward” vibe, escalation hesitation, failure to invite women home. Anything where a guy comes off as hesitant or is nervous about achieving a certain outcome.

Men who know there are women everywhere, and know they can get women whenever they want, goes the thinking, won’t worry about it.

But in fact, a standard abundance mentality will only get you halfway there.

Every guy new to the social arts works on his eye contact. He practices holding eye contact, maintaining it even in the face of social pressure from others who continue to hold eye contact back. He learns the importance of maintaining eye contact while speaking with and listening to others. He learns not to shift his eyes around from eye to eye while looking at someone else.