(2) Intermediate

About 3 weeks ago on the post announcing the site's new forum, a reader named "D" asked about escalating things with women, being seductive, and cool – essentially, how to be smooth.

Here's the gist of D's comment:

“Brother, I can initiate with no problems and create that instant attraction. But I seem to hit a wall at some point shortly after. I tend to have difficulty escalating to physicality. Granted I'm not very experienced in my endeavors but have been reading, studying, and trying to better myself; both in my body language and self image.

I need to know how to ignite the spark that I create and squirt a little gas on it.

I can create an opener from nothing and sometimes get 1 or 2 dates. Then something goes south. I try to be funny and witty, which works with openers, but I need to flip the switch to escalation and being SMOOTH to seal the deal! I feel like I have read almost everything out there so please my brother, let me know if you have any advice. I appreciate all that you've done and anything you can do to help me. Thank you!”

And just a week ago, another commenter, xChaser, this time on the post about anxiety in men, asked about something very similar, saying:

“Hi Chase,

I again want to let you know you blog is impacting lot of guys lives. I have improved a lot from implementing what's discussed here. I have one request on a topic that pretty much helps the new guys not end up wasting lot of time.

Basically what I noticed is as we gain in knowledge, we get more succesful at dealing with girls, but after moving quite forward in the interaction sometimes [after] a small mistake the girl drops you like a ball, never to recover.

Could you cover a topic around this major critical point where you up the ante and at least during initial days avoid those traps rather getting dropped flat after spending so much time on the girl.

I guess you got my point.

Thanks in advance,
xChaser”

Both commenters are asking about something I call "transition points" – those moments in an interaction with a woman where it's time for you to take things to the next level... if you can only figure out how.

Most guys can't, and drop the ball, as xChaser put it.

But what if you didn't drop the ball?

What if you could handle transition points like a pro every time?

What I'm asking is... what if you knew how to be smooth?

Because that's what I'm going to teach you to be today.

It's Friday night, and you're sitting at home by yourself. No girlfriend to spend time with, no gal you're kind of sort of seeing to call... not one girl to keep you company.

A thought pops into your head: "Maybe I can go out and pick up a girl!"

But, just as quickly as it popped excitedly into mind, a bunch more thoughts rush in to dampen your spirit, and you realize that you really just don't know how to pick up a girl.

You go to a bar or a nightclub, and... use a pick up line? Then what? Buy her a drink? And then just hope somehow at the end of the night the two of you end up in bed together.

No, no... you know it isn't that simple. There's a lot more to it than that. You just don't know what that "lot more to it" might be.

Fortunately though, by fate or fortitude or because you knew where to look, you found this post. As a guy who's spent the past six years studying, refining, and honing his ability to meet girls and get them in bed fast, and who's spent much of that time teaching other men to do the same, I'm rather uniquely qualified to help you succeed.

An example conversation (and accompanying point-by-point breakdown) with a woman just met, from the bumpy beginning to a bit after reaching the conversation's "hook point."

A few weeks back one of the readers here requested I get up an example of how a typical conversation goes for me with a new woman, and how I engage her. I tried to put a few conversations to paper over the past few weeks, but each of them was less than a great example – either because the girl engaged me a little too aggressively herself to be all that useful to beginning and intermediate guys, or because I knew the girl already through social circle so it wasn't a completely fresh connection, or because there were multiple people involved and I was juggling other men competing for a woman while I built a connection with her.

So rather than post up one of those messy examples, which might be useful in some ways but less-than-useful in others, instead I'll put up a made-up example conversation to show how you can use conversation to engage a girl who's moderately interested. Note that this is all stuff I use with real women and I've structured the girl's response to reflect how women typically respond to these conversational topics.

Airports, train stations, and bus stops are fantastic places to meet women - and if you're not using them to meet new girls, you're sorely missing out.

Efficiency in meeting women ought to be the name of the game for you, and there’s no more efficient way to meet women than wherever you happen to run into them. And if you’re on the go a lot, one of the easiest, most convenient places to meet women is however you happen to be going where you go.

I’ve met some incredible women on-the-go. The first fashion model I got together with I met waiting for a train; one of the most passionate, incredible women I had in my life I met boarding an airplane. Planes, trains, and buses are great avenues to meet new women in.

There are a few reasons why these make such great meeting points:

• Her guard is down. She’s not in super-social mode, doesn’t have her defenses up for dealing with annoying barflies and club guys, and hasn’t been hit on by every passing guy like she is at her favorite party spot. Because her energy level is going to be more normal here than in a nighttime venue, it’s much easier to connect quickly and naturally and avoid much of the extraneous stuff you’ll run into at night.

• She’s alone, and so are you. That means, you don’t have to mind her friends (or yours); you don’t have to keep an eye on a number of different people’s moods and behavior and actions. You only have to worry about her, and you. She’ll be less conscious without friends monitoring her actions, and more likely to be honest and upfront with you from the beginning.

• Transit game means high turnover. The more frequently you use transit, the more often you’re going to run into pretty girls on-the-go, and the turnover is quite high. The girl you see today you won’t see tomorrow; someone else will be in her place. The only time you start seeing the same people is if you make the same commute every day at the same exact time; most of the time, even if you’re making the same commute, you’ll have variance in your commute time (maybe one day you board the train at 6:10 PM; maybe another day at 6:13 PM; maybe a third day at 6:04 PM), and so will everyone else. Consequently, you’ll be running into new women over and over – which gives you many new women to meet, and many opportunities to meet them.

• You have instant social context. “Going anywhere exciting?” That’s really all you need to say to get the conversation started, at a bare minimum. Enough said.

So, great, you want to start doing transit approaches. What do you need to keep in mind as you do them?

Lots of men go out to get women to "like" them, and never push hard or drive toward any concrete objective or end point. But to truly succeed with girls consistently, a man must have intent.

One of the things that stuns me most, when going out with others, is noticing how some of the other men I meet and hang out with approach women.

Many of them, I’ve noticed, approach in a way that is either silly, entertaining, tentative, or half-assed – and women predictably don’t bite on their approach.

And when these men do make it into interactions with women, it’s obvious to a man who can read women that the women typically are simply being polite. Many men I’ve observed in this scenario, oblivious to the facial expressions and body language of the women they were talking to, walk away from a short interaction feeling triumphant, while the women walk away seemingly thinking along the lines of, “That was… different.”

When these men manage to find a woman who’s into them, they then often banter too long, joke too much, and stay in initial conversation too far into the interaction. They never act to move things forward, and eventually things fizzle out.

I call this Acting Without Intent.

Last weekend I spoke at a gathering of the San Diego pickup community. One of the things I skirted over briefly, due to time constraints, but that guys asked me to spend a little more time on and seemed very interested in hearing about, was on disqualifying yourself as a boyfriend.

Why would any guy trying to get girls want to make girls not want to date him?

Well, in answer to that, the long and short of it is this: women and men have different things to consider when it comes to having sex with someone new. And for women, the question of whether or not she wants a man as a boyfriend can muddy up the picture and make the decision to sleep with a guy quickly not so clear-cut.