(2) Intermediate

When I first moved to California, I set up a number of dates in advance (thanks, online dating!) so that I’d be able to hit the ground running when I got there.

My first date I set up for one week after I’d arrived (I wanted a little time to unpack and make my place presentable first... plus, after a 5-day cross-country drive, I really just wanted to settle in for a few days and see some friends in town before I dialed up on girls).

When that first date showed up one week later, I was floored – she’d looked good in her pictures, but in person she was absolutely smoking hot. I fell instantly in love. But she never quite reciprocated those emotions to me, and when we ended up back at my apartment at the end of the date and I tried to kiss her, she rejected this, told me she was uncomfortable, and left.

My second date was the next night. For this date, I drove about 30 minutes north of town and met her near where she lived. She met me wearing a white, modest wedding-style dress (unbeknownst to me, she’d apparently just gotten married – when I saw it, I thought, “Is that a wedding dress? Nah... there’s no way,” but apparently, it was), sipping a plastic cup of champagne. She was very cute, with a quite attractive face and waist-length hair, but I wasn’t super impressed at the time. We slept together a few hours later, and I was pretty happy then, because not only did she have a pretty face and great hair, but her body was absolutely killer. I hadn’t really realized it when I saw her in her modest (wedding) dress.

The girl from the first date I saw a few more times over the years, and only years later did I realize that face-wise, she wasn’t really that cute. And body-wise, well, she was thin by American standards, but not so by international ones, and her breasts were non-existent.

She just dressed and acted sexy. Bright colors, big sunglasses that left more of her face to the imagination, alternately suggestive and aloof behavior, like what we talked about in “Elegance, Sexiness, and Average, Normal People.”

Yet, she’d been the one I was excited about, while the one who was the whole package I’d merely thought “meh” at the time about.

And I see so many guys doing this all the time, getting caught up on the wrong girls, and then getting bitter because of how those girls treat them.

It’s kind of a clown show that we all fall victim to.

I’m going to wade back into theory on this one, a la “Picking Up Girls and the Game of Asymmetric Returns.” Only this time, we’ll be looking at the end game of picking up, instead of the middle game. Worth noting that some of the examples in this article are as well inspired by Nassim Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness – very good book.

Riz asks a few questions in the article on office politics about “settling down”:

“This leads me to my question(s)

1) Do successful seducers who see beyond classic dating ‘settle down’ ? – Thinking about it, why would they – They know that whichever girl they are with right now, there is probably out there somewhere, a girl who is even sexier, more intelligent, more fun, successful etc etc – They know they will never find Ms.Perfect – So why ‘settle’ – Whats the point?

Surely on of the big reasons most guys settle is because they fall in love with a girl and can’t help but cling onto her in false belief that they will never find another girl like her, they have to marry her now to solidify heir destined relationship and if things ever go wrong and they divorce then that’s it, life over.

2) What are your thoughts specifically on ‘settling down’ – I don’t know why exactly but even uttering those words ‘settle down’ sounds to me like giving up almost. To me it just sounds so defeatist. Why would anybody want to settle down lol, its crazy.

And I am not a young man either, I have though this for quite a while. Seems hardly anybody else really relates though.

It’s like for most, settling down is the ultimate goal to achieve in life. Everyone always talks about it in group ‘ah so are you settled yet?’ – And i’m like ‘uhh no...., should I?’”

These are good questions, yeah. Personally, I’ve never had a problem with the idea of long-term relationships and children, but the concept of “settling down” has always bugged me to high heaven... since I was a small boy, in fact.

There’s just something about how most “ordinary” folks define “settling down” as something that sounds, to someone like me, and Riz too by the sound of it, like “giving up on your dreams.”

It’s like saying “I’ve done all that I’m going to do; now it’s time to ‘get serious’ and go get a wife and a house with a white picket fence and go be a wage slave for the next 30 or 40 years so I can afford to pay off the mortgage on my McMansion and fleet of minivans, then die.”

When you’re someone who wants to do more with his life than the ordinary, you’ll tend to be quite allergic to the idea of settling down.

Yet, as alluring as the idea of bouncing around from one woman to the next until the end of time can seem, almost nobody does it... including all the men who assure you in their teens, twenties, and early thirties that they, definitely will stay single forever.

Why is that – why does almost everybody (including the folks who claim not to want to) eventually end up “settling down”?

Well, it’s all down to a little term called “satisficing.”

There's been some confusion on here recently, with readers noting some contrasts between my normal recommendations to guys, and what some of the other writers here report doing in some of their articles.

The biggest one is kissing girls in public - especially, kissing girls in bars, and kissing girls in clubs.

I gave somewhat of a blanket denouncement about ever kissing girls in public in "How to Kiss a Girl Like No One's Ever Kissed Her Before". If we want to be totally 100% technically correct, there are always exceptions, and this rule's one that - provided you meet certain requirements already - you can still get around.

Kissing a girl publicly is a tactic that can be powerful if used appropriately, but is devastating to your odds at getting a girl back somewhere alone with you for intimacy. In my strong opinion, it's much better to avoid this altogether, and simply maintain sexual tension, until you are home alone with a girl, and can quickly move from kissing to sex - the natural progression of things. Kissing is something that increases the randomness of your interactions, and polarizes them - it'll shift some women into overdrive, but will drive many more into auto-rejection or overprovides good feelings.

My general recommendation to guys that are learning is just "don't do this at all, unless you're pushing boundaries and really just want to see if you can do it and test yourself."

However... if you are suitably advanced, confident with women, and know what you are doing (e.g., not kissing for the sake of kissing, but kissing as part of a larger overall strategy)... you can indeed take the exception here, and not only not deflate sexual tension with a kiss, but actually amplify it.

So, to straighten out the signs seemingly pointing down divergent paths, and properly light up the way, let's peer into what the right way to use kissing in public is - and why most men use it all wrong.

content="Single on Valentine’s Day? Learn how to locate the lovelorn women in town... and put smiles on their faces and bounces in their steps.">

Part II of our series on Valentine's Day is directed at the single guys out there, after Part I, "What to Do with Your Girlfriend on Valentine's Day," covered the gamut for fellas in everything from casual to committed relationships. This one, then, is one how to pick up girls on Valentine's Day.

The title, however, is somewhat misleading; because, as it turns out, the best day to pick up girls around this holiday is not on the day itself. Rather, the best day to pick up girls on Valentine's Day is not on Valentine's Day; the best day to pick up girls on Valentine's Day is, in fact, the day after Valentine's Day... a day an old friend of mine introduced to me as "National Rebound Day."

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.