(2) Intermediate

How do you meet girls when you are the quiet, introverted guy?

Well, the good news is, quiet guys have a lot of power to do very well with women, once they can get over that initial ‘shyness’ hump.

There’s a lot to focus on in life, and little guidance. Where should you concentrate your efforts? To these 12 key areas: women, money, strategy, and more.

I’ve had guys ask me over the years what areas of their lives to focus on outside of women. And younger guys have asked what they ought to have handled as they get older. Society’s grown more complex than at perhaps any other time in history, due to myriad factors. However, one of the biggest factors has been the near-total abandonment of preparing young people for what to expect in life.

In place of lessons and guidance, we give them feel-good Hollywood films and vapid platitudes. Things that for prior generations were known and expected in life are surprises for the generations now coming of age, left to their own devices to figure these things out (or not).

So I’ve worked to set out a list here of the 12 most important things for a man to have handled before he turns 35. If you’re young, these are the items in life you need to concentrate your energy on. If you’re older and you haven’t handled all these yet, it’s not too late to start. This isn’t a list designed to make you ‘feel bad’ if you haven’t accomplished these yet – this article isn’t about ‘feelings’. This article is about masculine concerns: what areas of your life can you work on that will improve your life?

The more work you do on these 12 areas, the better your life will be.

If your life is already awesome, improve these areas and it will become more awesome. If it’s less than awesome, improve these areas and you will change that too. Note that some men have some degree of natural ability in some of these areas. But no one is a natural at them all – and every man has room to improve in each.

Girls play the role of cocktease or attention whore (or worse) because these roles can be fun. But what’s the psychology behind this kind of “fun”?

There are short term and long term impacts on the fruits of our actions in the mating game. In the short term, we can create a really fun seduction, great sex with a beautiful woman, and the potential beginning of an ongoing relationship. Some choose to stay at Point 2, while others go on to Point 3. In the long term, we have the power and ability to grow powerfully with another human, with or without children, as we also have the power to experience many different women. Unfortunately, we can also create an opportunity to ruin our lives through some unforeseen consequence of an action – perhaps the wrong action at the wrong time – or just merely dealing with the wrong person.

In our modern era, women hold immense power to dictate social ramifications of sexual encounters and relationships gone awry. In this more cautionary article, I wish to make you aware of some less-glamorous aspects of the mating game – situations that if not handled correctly can create extreme unhappiness, commitment problems, legal problems, and financial problems. Better to be aware of these as they are happening than to find yourself on the losing side of a challenge.

I recently picked up a book while visiting Boston, called Games People Play: The Basic Handbook of Transactional Analysis by Eric Berne. This book was first published in 1964 and is meant to be a handbook for psychiatry, yet I felt compelled to write this article when I realized a strong connection between patterns outlined in the book and many firsthand experiences of myself and friends. The book is quite academic and covers far more than just sexual scenarios, so to save you from reading it (it was quite boring admittedly), I’ll cover some dynamic patterns I’ve seen repeatedly that may be confusing to participants in the game.

I hope this summary and analysis of Games People Play helps you identify how to handle complex social-sexual situations, which when mishandled, have resulted in life-altering lawsuits, loss of credentials, loss of work, and worse.

Inside every man is a beast. Yet how to use this beast in the context of civilization? In civil society, the man must tame his beast – but not kill it.

The end is nigh.

• In part 1 of this series, we discussed how we live in a primal and violent world that has little mercy for weakness.

• In part 2, we talked about how you need to cultivate a primal ferocity if you want to survive in this world, let alone thrive. This ferocity helps you socially and sexually.

• In part 3, we covered some habits and mannerisms that will help you cultivate and demonstrate your ferocity.

• Then, in the penultimate article, we covered how to transmute this animalistic energy into the bedroom and make your girl’s bed rock like a Flintstone.

Now, for the culmination of the series, I want to cover how to be primal but civilized and how to understand the difference between cold, civilized power and primal power.

Fundamentals are the vehicle for your game. Game, being nothing more or less than the ability to get someone to do what you want, is itself verbal, but the performance of a seduction includes much more than that. It's the way you speak and the way you act. Very often, it's not what you say, but what you don't say.

It’s been years… and now she wants to reconnect. Should you meet her? And beyond that, should you date her?

I received an email recently from a girl I hadn’t heard from in six or seven years.

I’d known her from social circle (back when I still maintained a social circle). She was skinny, fun, and cute, with an endearing California Valley girl accent (and all the expressiveness that entails). She also had that somewhat uptight air about her that can be a little off-putting but is really fun when you break through it and reach the real her.

Anyway, this was not a girl I’d hooked up with. Didn’t really have a good opportunity, and in any event I slept with other girls from that circle who were younger and didn’t have the same walls up she did. I met up with her various times in our shared social circle. Toward the end of my time in that circle, I scheduled a one-on-one meet with her but had to flake on it... and when she wanted to meet again I wasn’t able to make myself available for it. And after that we were in different cities and she fell off my radar. She was 29 years old back then.

So I got an email from her after more than half a decade, just saying she saw an event and wondered if I intended to go to it and asking if I was in town.

And the only thing I could think was, “Wow, 36 years old and still single, huh?”

Sometimes you’ll meet girls who won’t contribute to conversation. When this happens, you’ll have to step up and do the talking yourself.

One of our forum members by the name of Witcher had a few questions about deep diving, one of which was this:

“Deep diving demand[s] from the seducer to ask girls a lot of questions, How to not make It look like an interview or audition? This is the impression I have doing it and It feels a little weird.”

Of course, one of the keys to deep diving is that you not make it feel like an interview... which means past a certain number of questions, if she hasn’t begun to participate much yet, you need to turn your questions into statements. You can do this with cold reads (instead of: “What do you do for work?”, make it: “You look like either an anthropologist or an entrepreneur, I’m not sure which”). And beyond this, if she doesn’t get more involved, you will need to start to tell stories and otherwise steer the conversation with your own content.

The better your fundamentals, the faster you hook girls in... and the more likely you are to end up in conversations where girls pelt you with questions and/or open up about themselves from the get-go. Yet even if your fundamentals are in a class of their own, you will still encounter women who seem, for lack of a better term for it, ‘conversationally impaired’.

Could be she isn’t interested. Could be she’s not in a social mood. Could be she’s just a quiet person and not particularly talkative.

But if you find yourself in such a conversation, with a girl who sticks around and passes your compliance tests (so you know you’re not wasting your time on a disinterested girl), yet nevertheless doesn’t contribute, you will need another approach.

You’ll need to be able to run the conversation when the girl’s contribution is all or mostly absent.