(3) Journeyman

A reader named Tomas asks the following about interacting with awkward women in "Spell Broken: Big Mistakes That Shred Conversation":

“Just have a question. Some women do exactly one or more of those. They don't keep things light and/or stuck at topics and/or hold on to opposite opinions provoking debates and/or criticize... it might be even done unconsciously.

Sometimes she breaks the spell almost systematically and you cannot do anything. Those women may be attracted at first, but they literally undermine their own attraction to you. And I mean, not by your fault.

How should such situations be handled? If you persist, she loses all attraction. If you address the elephant in the room, she will be offended and sent into auto-rejection. In both cases, she will blame you for the result, not herself. Another option is just to disqualify her and run... Or is a better way?”

I remember running into girls like this when I was still figuring out my approach with women exactly. It sort of feels like these girls have antibodies against connection formation. It's like they simply don't want to get to know people on an intimate basis.

Eventually I realized that they were doing the same thing I used to do back in high school - using humor and debate and topic-jumping to protect themselves from getting into any real, meaningful conversation... or any conversation that ventures too close to the personal.

Realizing this, I set about trying to get to the bottom of it - and to see if I could find a way around it.

A little over a year and a half ago, I wrote an article on here called "The Ultimate Guide on How to Get a Girl Back." It fairly quickly became one of the more popular articles on the site, as getting girls back whose interest you've lost tends to be a common thing a great many men are all trying to figure out.

That piece also led to me getting a relatively constant stream of emails and comments and requests to write the post I'd promised, provided there was enough interest, at the end of it - a post on how to get your girlfriend back.

Here's the latest request, from longerjt on the article about using scarcity:

“Chase -

So yesterday I layed it out and challenged a girlfriend to get in or out and she slammed me. I said I needed to know where she stood and that I was ready to move on and bam! She said take a hike. Guess I misplayed it.

Hence, can you do the post you promised some time ago, "how to get your girlfriend back" in "how to get a girl back"? I could use it now.

Thanks for the great stuff!

JT”

If you've been reading this site a while, you may have thought I was asleep at the wheel, or that I didn't care to address this question. A lot of people have asked about it.

But in fact, over the past 19 months or so, I've probably written a half dozen versions of this article. It's not that it's technically difficult to write... it's that there are certain moral implications in taking a girlfriend back, under certain conditions, that I feel it's important for men to understand, and it's also that I find most men trying to get their ex-girlfriends back are more concerned with what they want than with what their former girlfriends want (and need).

I think I'm in a place now where I can communicate this right.

So today, let's discuss how to get a girlfriend back - and who you need to be and what you need to be willing to do if you're going to pull this off.

It isn't always hard. Plenty of people get back together every day. But I'll be writing this for the hard cases - the ones where she isn't already knocking down your door for another try. So I'll be giving you some stuff that's tried and tested, that I've used myself multiple times, and that I've watched friends and students and mentees use effectively again and again.

But believe you me, if I find out you've used this irresponsibly and hurt some girl by being selfish, I will come to where you live and demolish you.

That out of the way, let's get on with it.

Over on the discussion boards, Stratvm discussed a phone number he'd grabbed in Switzerland while just passing through, and wanted to know how he could convert this quick phone number into a real booty call - how does he get this girl coming over for sex. He noted:

“It would be nice to have a blog post on how to convert numbers to same day lays; now I'm just guessing how to proceed.”

This article is going to be about two things:

1. How to get a girl you've just met to respond to a "booty call"
2. How to get into a booty call relationship with a girl you've already been with
3. How to screen for the women who are likely to be open to booty calls
   

... and that last one's especially important. Not every girl is open to the idea of slinking over to your pad close to the witching hour for a late night slice of lovin'. Some women find the idea offensive to their sensibilities.

But the ones who are open to it... you may well be leaving them feeling a little less excitement in their lives by not going for it.

So here's how to pull a booty call off - and we'll begin with all the wrong ways men go about trying to get women over for some quality between-the-sheets time.

In "How to Talk About Yourself on Dates," a reader writes in to ask about dealing with male competition:

“Hi Chase,

Awesome site and truly amazing articles. There was one particular topic I was searching for but couldn’t find it. It's dealing with experience. Since the days before I came across this site I was pretty bad with girls, I have had problems dealing with competition. As soon as there is competition from guys with slightly better game I am rather clueless what to do. It's like I lose all the energy and confidence and hand it over to the other guy. Since in a normal scenario (college or university pretty girls are mostly hounded with tons of guys) this is most likely to happen everywhere and you'll keep losing girls if you don't sort it out. I know the obvious choice would be to ignore the guy and just follow the ways explained on the site. But if there’s a guy with naturally good game aiming of the same girl in front of you I find it impossible to ignore the same. There has to be a way to get around it!!Would be great if you could help me with the same...”

Dealing with other men competing with you in the dating arena can be a big headache. I certainly went through it during my learning curve - it's no fun to lose, but it's a whole lot less fun when not only do you lose, but some girl you liked clearly picks another man over you. In fact, it can be one of the most painful events you’ll experience.

So how do you deal with male competition - especially with men more experienced with women than you are? That's a tough nut to crack... and it's going to depend as much on your calm and your baseline fundamentals as it will on your "game."

In "How to Approach a Girl Wherever You Are (Easily)," J comments:

“Hey Chase,

Another Great article you churn these things out left and right man! This one was so info packed I'm finding myself reading it again and again which is a great thing. One idea that was running through my head while reading this post was this concept of cementing emotion.

You mentioned it in your girls chase book but its a brief but very interesting section. I've always wanted to know how to deliver those "Wow what a connection we have" lines.

I was thinking about it the whole time I read this post, because I was noticing more and more that I'd get to step 9 or 10 and flame out there. Like I'd deep dive too much and "break the spell."

And I've been wracking my brained trying to understand what I was doing there but then I remembered your section on cementing emotions. So, I've been reading up on that and your spell broken article.

Would love to hear more thoughts on this man, it's a fascinating aspect of game. Because I've cemented certain emotions in women and have been fascinated with myself. Like WTF! where did that come from.

Anyways man just wanted to drop a line there about that. Maybe I'll add another to the list of article ideas with this one ;) hahaha

The Loyal reader extraordinaire,

JFav”

Emotions are quick, fleeting things - here one moment, gone the next. What's worse is, emotions are easily forgotten things - a girl may be really into you one minute, but completely have forgotten she was a minute later. And once a feeling's forgotten, good luck trying to bring it back if you hadn't cemented it first.

To teach you the technique of cementing emotions in women's (or anyone's) memory, I want to cover a brain hack today that essentially serves as a memory aid for cementing emotions, so that you can help women recall good emotions they felt for you earlier, even if they aren't feeling them right now.

Last week, I wrote about what's wrong with dating in America. I wrote it after being troubled when reading about the latest round of pettiness erupting into a media firestorm because of the "battle of the sexes"; at tech convention PyCon, a female employee of email company SendGrid heard a couple of male employees of game developer PlayHaven making juvenile jokes about the words "dongle" and "forking," turned around, took their pictures, excoriated them online, and PlayHaven fired them.

After the resulting firestorm, centering on this individual who had a couple of men with families fired for whispering jokes to one another in a conference, SendGrid attracted a great deal of hostility from the developer community (in other words, its customer base), and consequently fired the picture-taker. (You can read the full article here, if interested.)

That got me thinking a lot about where all the virulence between the sexes in the West has come from recently. You don't see it a lot of other places in the world... just here. Like I talked about in the article on bitter women, I'm not really so certain there are that many truly terrible people out there, as much as it is that the Internet acts as an emotion amplifier and makes it seem so, with its text-only, subtext-free, tonality-free communication making everything seem so cut and dry, black and white, and frequently making everyone sound so certain, absolute, and polarizing.

But as I thought about it, I realized there was something else causing conflict between men and women, too: a product of a mix of the modern unisex workplace and social environment, and the Western ideal of independence, but not at all what any of the women (or men) struggling for women's rights ever expected - that "equality," at least as most people have fought for it for Western women, has really ended up meaning that women are now required not only to fight with other women for what they want, but to fight with men now too - and that men are required to fight them back.

I've been reading a lot of stuff lately about people frustrated with dating. It comes from both sides of the aisle: women who are frustrated that they simply can't find dateable men, and men who are frustrated that women are far too picky, and complaining there aren't any dateable men, when they seemingly just skip right over these all men who, on paper, meet all of those girls' supposed requirements.

It's interesting to read. I researched dating and romantic history quite heavily for the relationship book I was writing last year (that I've since put on hold - I'm not in a position to effectively market another book just yet), and while a lot of male-female complaints are as old as time itself, I can tell you that this one - that there just aren't any dateable men, and that the women themselves are far too picky - is one I haven't encountered in the literature prior to the advent of the modern dating and relationship system in the early 20th century.

It's a whole new flavor of disconcert and disbelief.

Thing is, whenever you see people in disbelief at their inability to do or get something, it's a blaringly loud sign of a flawed mental model. They've got something wrong - their expectations are off. Fantasy isn't jibing with reality.

And right now, when you look at how dating in America and dating in much of the West plays out, you're seeing this wide-eyed, confused disbelief from a large segment of both the male and the female dating populations.

You don't hear about it from middle-aged folks. You don't hear women over 40 complaining much how there are "no men to date" - even though women at that age have far fewer options than their younger, louder counterparts. You also don't hear men over 40 complaining that "women skim right past them."

So what's going on with the under-40 crowd that's got everybody so addled?