(3) Journeyman

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.

As you work on yourself and improve and become a higher and higher value person – a man who’s really got his life together, with a solid group of high achieving friends and connections, with multiple options with beautiful women, with goals and dreams and ambitions and numerous pathways to success laid out ahead of you and accomplishments behind you – you become an increasingly imposing individual.

And that’s both good and bad.

I originally was going to write this up as an article on being impressive. But I think impressiveness in its own right doesn’t need a write-up; if you work on your fundamentals and you take care of business in things like body language and posture and voice tone and manner of speaking, you will naturally build yourself into an impressive, imposing individual. Throw in some intrigue into how you choose to define yourself and respond to questions and challenges, and you will rapidly develop into a very naturally impressive, imposing individual. It comes with the territory.

What’s a more difficult prospect, though, is how you make yourself approachable and accessible to people once you’ve gotten there.

Conversation and the conversationalist: probably one of the most under-discussed topics in the social arts. What a pity. Conversation is part of the backbone upon which everything related to socializing is built upon, but in the 21st century that’s almost forgotten. You might go so far as to say that the art of the conversationalist is a vanishing art.

In this day and age of sound bites, quick blurbs of news, and friends and acquaintances using social media to spit out short, tepid, meaningless quips about their days and feelings and whatever else springs to mind and gets unloaded out on the uncaring and overburdened ears of the Internet, being a good conversationalist is a rare thing. Being someone who is able to deftly move from topic to topic, keeping a conversation flowing effortlessly and breezily forward, diving into the depths of another individual’s personal life and concerns, then coming back up for air with a bit of laughter and lightheartedness before things get too heavy, then diving back down again to find out more about this person you’ve met just an hour ago than his or her closest family members know… this is what the lost art of being skilled in conversation is all about.