(3) Journeyman

Most men who've been studying the social arts a little while come to realize, either consciously or instinctually, that coming out and telling women things about themselves unasked is an inferior means of conversing than first being asked for things before telling them. People start to come to understand the laws of effort and investment intuitively, and they recognize that another person putting in effort to learn something about them is better than another person putting in no effort and learning something about them regardless.

Even then, though, this rule – a very important social rule – often flies under the radar of most men, and they continue seeking to build rapport with women (or even attempting to force rapport, you might say) by sharing as much free, unasked for information about themselves as they can.

I call this "trading information," and view it as one of the vilest, most heinous social crimes you can commit. It does two things that are positively detrimental to your efforts to be charming and engaging and delightful and seductive with women, and, after an example of what many guys do and you ought not to do, I'll explain both of those below. Then, I'm going to introduce a concept some of you may be familiar with but many are not: baiting, and how you as a conversationalist can use it to get women vastly more invested in you and your conversations with them.

Ever meet a girl, and get her contact information, and then start chatting with her via phone or text message, and then go to set up a date with her – maybe to get some food, maybe a drink, maybe to just chill and hang out and watch a movie at your place – only to have her offer a counterproposal that suited you far less? Perhaps she suggested going shopping, or that you join her out with a group of her friends, or come to some party she was attending.

Ever accept one of those counteroffers? If you did, you may very well have kicked yourself for going later, when you ended up getting slotted into the friend zone and never got together with the girl. Maybe, just maybe, a guy tooth-and-claws it, and fights off her other suitors, and eventually on Date #6 he gets her in the sack, but of course by that point she has him firmly pinned down into boyfriend territory. And maybe she even does end up becoming his girlfriend because by that point he's invested so much in her that he thinks she's better than the other women he has available.

This is what happens when you don't date on your terms. You don't get the girl most of the time. Actually, most of the time, you waste your time, and get slotted into the friend zone, or become a potential boyfriend at best.

Solution? Stop dating women on their terms, and start dating them on yours.

Several nights ago, I was out with a friend in a nightclub, and I noticed a cute platinum blonde German girl standing next to him not doing anything while the two friends she was with, a girl and a guy, flirted back and forth. "You should talk to that girl," I suggested. So he did, and she happily engaged.

At one point though, he turned to me and said, "Chase, where did you say you were from again?" and then introduced the girl to me and told her where I was from. She quickly jumped off of him and rotated around to my side, away from him, and began chatting me up. I flirted with her, pinched her arm a bit, had her tell me why she was in China if she disliked it so much. My buddy eventually roped her back in again, and I withdrew. She peeled off and left a short time later.

After she left, I asked my friend a question: "Why did you introduce her to me? Did you run out of conversation with her?" He said that no, things had just been slowing down, so he thought perhaps adding another interesting person to the mix might spice the interaction up a bit.

"Dude," I said, "you broke circle. Never be the first to break circle when you're talking to a girl." He didn't know what I meant, so I explained.

I had a couple of discussions with friends yesterday about the women they’re dating. One of my friends is going through a rough breakup with his live-in girlfriend whom he’s been financially supporting for the past half year since she hasn’t been able to find a job and has run out of money. He’s been giving her “emergency cash” that she’s then been using to go party, buy drinks, take skiing trips when he’s not in town, and lend out to her girlfriends. And at least once, she’s called him up in late at night out with friends of hers pleading him to come help her because she’s run out of money and no one else has money and she needs cab fare to get home.

My other friend is dating a girl who cooks well for him and is positive, but who also isn’t the greatest on the looks-scale and isn’t the smartest. He wasn’t crazy about her at first, but now she’s starting to grow on him.

To be honest, both of these situations freaked me out a little bit. To my first friend, I said, “Why the hell are you financing this girl’s frivolity?” He said he knew, and he was ending it, but he hadn’t expected all that to happen and he just kind of fell into it. To my second friend, I said, “You realize you’re getting comfortable and settling in with a sub-par woman, right?” He said he knew, and he should probably go look for something else, but he was just so comfortable.

Neither of these guys are bad with women, or inexperienced with women. They both do all right. But both of them didn’t do something that’s a top priority for me early on: screening out bad potential situations before they arise.

Something I noticed when I made the shift from being cool and friendly to being cool and sexy and edgy was that all of a sudden, women wanted to go to bed with me fast, and they were a lot less pushy about relationships. At the time, I just thought, “Well, of course, women want to have sex with a sexy man.” Well, I just read some research that fleshes this out quite a bit more.

In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 100(2), February 2011, Terri Conley of the University of Michigan’s Department of Psychology goes back and reopens research into casual sex propositions, and her findings with this new research are quite revelatory, at least when it comes to breaking down old paradigms in the “men want casual sex, women don’t” view of the world.

Discussing his night out at a club with a friend of mine, I noted that at one point a girl he liked was wanting to talk to him but he was playing it cool. His girl then went off talking to another guy, then disappeared for a while, and my friend was sitting there, fingers crossed, hoping it would work out. He eventually got to talking to this girl again and made out with her a bit later, and probably could’ve gotten together with her had a few things occurred differently, but one of the biggest things that stuck out to me was that period where my friend was left waiting and hoping.

It stuck out to me because I realized that was something I used to do a lot of, but now I never do at all. It wasn’t a conscious decision; it’s not one of those things you train for typically in the social arts. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about not waiting and hoping, come to think of it. It’s always more about leading and being decisive, but those things are rarely explained with any degree of specificity.

I realize now though that it’s very bad form, and that it is as well indicative of holes in your game. I used to get very impatient when I was waiting for women to do something, and impatience, I always used to think, is not a good thing to be feeling. This post is going to focus on not leaving seduction to chance, on recognizing and closing those holes you discover while playing the waiting game, and how to take action in an effective, non-needy way.

Quick blurb here, I’ll get a proper post up for today in a little while.

Just read about a fascinating cognitive bias that’s been tested over the course of multiple experiments and shown to likely be a real phenomenon. The bias is this: incompetent people tend to overestimate their knowledge relative to others, assuming that they already know it all, while competent people, realizing how much there is to a topic, tend to underestimate their knowledge relative to others, assuming that others know as much or more than they do.

So someone who’s ignorant of a topic may well stand on a soap box and loudly cry out about the “truth,” while someone who’s far more informed and competent may feel he knows but a drop in the bucket and remain quiet, confident that others out there know more. I’ve long been wary of people who proclaim to know all the answers, and held them to a higher degree of skepticism than anyone else… the proposed cognitive bias in question, Dunning-Kruger, gives me some scientific justification to that skepticism.