(3) Journeyman

I'm being driven nuts right now about a discussion I'm having with my girlfriend about something we've already discussed and I thought was settled. It has to do with a difference in belief systems; I show her solid evidence and research from the West proving my position, she returns to hearsay, word-of-mouth, and ingrained beliefs she's getting from friends in the East who aren't actually informed on the matters at hand but have firm beliefs on them nonetheless.

She's normally a very logical, rational girl, but this specific matter is driving her uncharacteristically batty, and she's falling back to fears refuted by science but given weight by popular opinion. Understanding why this happens to otherwise sane, rational individuals is key to understanding how people's views of the world are built and maintained.

It's similar to the autism-vaccine "debate" that's going on in the States right now, or the electricity-cancer "debate." No matter how much research is done to show that there is absolutely, positively, no link whatsoever between vaccines and autism, or power stations and cancer, people continue to believe there are causal links anyway, because they've seen and heard sources that support their position.

The worst part is, it doesn't matter where those sources got their information from. It doesn't even matter if the sources outright say, "I just know it." The only thing that matters is that there are, indeed, sources that support the position.

Enter reference points: something I've mentioned at times on this blog but haven't devoted an actual post on (see "How to Get Real Girls" and "Social Status: Building It and Using It" for the latest posts that mentioned these). Reference points and reference experiences are what we use to define our belief systems, worldviews, and ideas about reality, and they're absolutely crucial to the way we see life on Planet Earth.

Ever find yourself talking to a really cute girl, and have her start acting bored and distracted?

You probably began scrambling hard to try and get her interested again. And, if you succeeded, you likely felt like you'd won a crucial victory, and you felt like things with this girl were now stronger than ever. You'd been on the brink, and recovered.

You also probably were very careful to keep her interested after that, and stay on topics she'd find engaging, and off topics she wouldn't like. You worked harder to make things work, and likely came to value her more highly than you do other women who never seemed bored with you.

I want to work on getting you doing the same thing now with women. We've talked about nonverbal communication before here; this is another piece of the nonverbal puzzle. In this post, I'm going to show you how you can use boredom and the bored look to keep women off of bad topics and on good ones, and make them pay more attention and invest more in your conversations.

This is a strategy that women use all the time. So let's even the odds a little bit and get you using it too.

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.