(3) Journeyman

Friend zones, friends with benefits, sexless marriages – many relationships are lopsided and unhappy. Why do these relationships exist (and how do you avoid them)?

In dating, there is one truth above all, and that is that men want a few things from women, and women want a few things from men, and not all those things overlap.

The result of this failure to overlap is sometimes you have a woman who is good at getting what she wants without giving the men she gets it from everything (or anything) they want. Likewise, you sometimes have a man who is good at getting what he wants without giving the women he gets it from everything (or anything) they want.

This mismatch is the root of all the most unhappy relationships with the most broken dynamics you see in dating. The friend zone, where a man who wants intimacy with a woman is exiled to her sexless borderlands without it. Friends with benefits, which some women are fine with for some time, but most women eventually go at least a little crazy in. Disrespectful and/or sexless long-term relationships or marriages, where the man is treated as a second-class partner. And neglectful and/or domineering long-term relationships or marriages, where the woman is treated as a second-class partner.

The Zen area of dating, of course, are setups where both partners get what they want: where the woman gets everything she desires, and the man gets everything he desires.

But not every coupling will be this way. Most won’t.

Instead, most fall somewhere into that overlap zone – for a very simple reason.

How you conduct yourself has a big effect on how attractive you are to women. Cool heads in moments of chaos set men significantly apart.

Hey, guys. Welcome back. Today we will discuss another subject that I believe will make you a better seducer.

This subject is one of the variables covered in my post “How to Tell If a Guy Is a Good Seducer” where we covered multiple variables that I believe are what give a guy great success, and more importantly, great consistency – which kind of signifies that the “luck aspect” is less significant for him, hence why he is good.

In that post, we covered the following variables:

• Calibration (we made a series on that)

• Timing (was covered in my series on calibration)

• State control (we made a series on that, too)

• Awareness (also discussed recently in light of state control)

• Logistics (covered to death here on Girls Chase, but I supplemented things with a post on logistical awareness)

• Decision making (and cool-headedness, also related to state control)

Decision making is another subject that I believe has been under discussed. I will make this a two-part article, with the first piece focusing on cool-headedness (the right state of mind to be in whenever facing difficult situations). We will focus more on the practical aspects of decision making in Part 2.

Decision making is key, and it can mean the difference between hitting and missing. Wrong decision? You are out. Think about it. You have a great lead with a girl but suddenly decide to change venues (without her). Well, guess what, you won’t bang that girl. Now, perhaps you may find another girl in the next venue, but what if the next venue sucks and you get no leads? I am sure we’d all agree the decision was bad.

Usually, situations that force you to make decisions hastily result in, sadly, unfortunate decisions. She is resisting, your material is not working, a cockblock shows up, or another wildcard chimes in (e.g., her friend starts puking). These situations can be stressful, forcing you to make a decision, and often quickly. We will discuss these scenarios in further detail next week. However, before you are able to become a good decision maker in the field of seduction, you first and foremost need to understand the importance of cool-headedness.

Cool-headedness is a prerequisite for decision making in dating, pickup, and seduction. To be honest, I think it also is essential for all types of decision making in life.

Therefore, we will focus on this subject first before moving on to the more practical aspects of decision making.

Mass approaching gets a bum rap. When it’s used well, it stops being sloppy and scattershot… and becomes a savvy, effective way to meet many women in a hurry.

Do you ignore signs of interest from girls or get too nervous to approach? You may want to spend 5 minutes to rehearse approaches and scenarios in your mind.

If you’ve ever gone out to chat up new women and had approach anxiety hit, you know how much it sucked. You wanted to talk to girls, hoped to talk to girls, tried to talk to girls... then couldn’t.

You walked up next to a girl with the long black hair and the tight jeans on the street corner as she waited for the light to change. You said nothing.

You took a seat in a café next to a girl with medium-length blonde hair and big googly glasses. She glanced at you a few times, and you tried to summon your nerve. Yet your nerve went unsummoned, and you and her never spoke.

That night you went out with your buddies to the lounge, and this one girl in a sequined dance danced over right near you. You could tell she wanted to meet you. You tried to get yourself to say hi, but you didn’t say anything.

It might be you just weren’t socially warmed up. You lack social momentum, and needed to do some warm-ups – but you hadn’t done them yet.

You wish you could just spring into action the moment you saw a girl.

Is there a way you could?

Perhaps there is. Next time you go out, try to rehearse your approaches first.

Everyone out there is trying to influence you. How susceptible are you to that influence – and how susceptible are those around you?

I wanted to write a quick post (that turned out not to be so quick) on resistance and susceptibility to influence. This article is something of a cousin piece to my piece on grouping and herding in dating from last week.

The subject of this article - resistance and susceptibility to influence- goes for you and the people around you. Your friends, your family, your workmates, your lovers, partners, and dates.

Everyone is susceptible to the influence of other people and forces. The degree of susceptibility varies from person to person, and situation to situation. Some people are more easily influenced than others. Some situations make it easier to influence people than others. Most people are only marginally aware (at best) of their influencability.

If you are susceptible to influence but do not realize it, other people can step into your mind and make you think things and believe things you might not really want to think or believe. This can lead you to taking actions you might previously not have agreed with. Sometimes this turns out to be beneficial; sometimes not really.

For an example of the beneficial sort, I had a friend in university who influenced me to apply for an internship with Nike and pick up a minor in supply chain. Until this friend, I did not care about getting a job after school, was doing the minimum necessary to get through school, and disdained the idea of internships. Yet because of this friend, who'd had an impressive co-op run building a new supply chain process at Tyco, I grew excited about getting a good job and doing better in school. I didn't get the internship, but came in second in a pool of 200 candidates and got some very valuable feedback from the interviewer which played a key role in me getting the job I did get, a year later. I got more a lot more focused on school and got straight As again the next semester, for the first time in years. And I got my dream job on the first try - I zeroed in on them and the job fair and blew their socks off in my interview. Had that friend not influenced me, none of that would've happened.

Years later, I was in a startup where one of my business partners influenced me to open up the purse strings more than I thought was wise, against my instincts and all the reading I'd done on startups spending all their money too quick being one of the #1 reasons they go under. He influenced me to do a number of other things more in-tune with how he thought we should do things and less in tune with how I thought we should. We ran out of money and I had to close the business and lay everyone off. The partner who'd influenced me to spend more managed to negotiate the rights to the business away from myself and the other partner (despite having joined the startup much later, and having taken far more capital out of it than he'd put into it), then sold those rights to another group of founders. The business is now a successful venture-backed business doing everything I originally wanted to do, and would've had it do... had we not run out of funds so quick.

I don't regret the experience (I enjoy Girls Chase much more as a business; and I received a lifetime of invaluable lessons in negotiation, predatory partnerships, and sticking to your guns - plus a healthy dose of business confidence after I found I'd been right all along), but the outcome was a direct result of that business partner influencing me to act in ways contrary to how I'd have acted on my own.

Every human being is susceptible to the influence of other human beings. There are no exceptions to this. Locate the strongest, most resolute human being in the world, and I guarantee you we can find a way to make him crack with enough time, and the right people, in the right situation.

The question we want to look at today though is how susceptible vs. resistant are you and those around you?

What’s one thing all the best seducers have in common? Logistical awareness. Where to go, what to pay attention to, and all the secret spots inside the venue.

Despite our language and identities, people move in herds. You have three (3) tools to get the girl you want from her tribe: integration, separation, and absorption.

We think of ourselves as individuals. Separate, unique, we act entirely of our own volition.

Yet man is a herd animal. Cram him into a wall-to-wall, shoulder-to-shoulder crowded concert or train station, then spook the herd, and you kick off a stampede. People may die, crush others, or trample, as throngs of panicked individuals, each catching the sense of panic from the next, surge over and against each other for the exits. In the aftermath of some deadly stampedes, investigators can find no emergency and cannot even figure out what caused the panic.

Show a man a market craze that everyone is getting in on and watch him lose his mind. In China, peer-to-peer lending has exploded as the economy has declined, even though defaults on these loans are sky high and the prospect of getting a return is dim. A few months earlier in the West, a Bitcoin craze thundered across the market. It was unrelated to any improvement in the usability or acceptance of Bitcoin as a currency – in fact, over the past several years, Bitcoin has only grown worse as a currency. 100% of Bitcoin’s increased valuation was due to market speculators buying up Bitcoin to cash in on the craze. Yet during Bitcoin fever, everyone was an optimist, telling friends, family members, and coworkers to “buy, buy, buy!” Today, five months after the crush began, the price of Bitcoin has come very close to where it was before the stampede ever began; in the process, thousands of people made fortunes, and thousands of others lost them (I personally know a few folks on both sides). Every bit of those gains and losses came at the expense or benefit of someone else gambling the other way.

(side note: fun dub of a Russian music video a friend of mine who was heavily invested in Bitcoin shared with me during the peak of the Bitcoin craze):

These, of course, are extreme scenarios.

And much of the time, even for people aware of human herd mentality, the concept gets peacefully tucked away into a kind of “only in extremes” awareness. Only in extreme situations, we tell ourselves, do humans behave in mindless, herd-like ways. The rest of the time, we are those unique, separate, totally consciously in-control individuals we tell ourselves we truly are.

However, this isn’t how it works at all. Man, as a social animal, is every bit as groupish as ants, horses, biofilms, and wildebeest. More to the point for our purposes, if you want to peel a woman out of her group, or get her to do what you wish in public, an understanding of how grouping and herding works in the people you’d like to influence is key.