(3) Journeyman

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.

The chief tenet of the Law of Least Effort in seduction is that the less effort you put in while still achieving the desired result, the more powerful, attractive, and sexy you appear. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is by learning to communicate without the use of words.

If you’ve ever studied very charismatic people – I have, and I recommend it – something you’ll notice is that they frequently say things with fun, charming, wordless expressions. A smile and a wink, say, or a mischievous look. For instance, maybe someone asks a charismatic man if he can handle a certain situation – he gives them the skeptical look with just a hint of a knowing smile and then gets to it. Or maybe he gives a small smile, makes a thumbs up sign, and goes about his business.

This is one of those things that’s as effective in opening as it is in closing, and it’s useful throughout the course of an interaction. Pulling on a woman’s arm or shoulders or waist (or, if you’re in bed or on the sofa, her legs or feet) and dragging her into you is one of those very fun, very dominant, very sexual things a man can do to a woman (or a woman can do to a man!) that take things and spike the level of excitement and intrigue very quickly.

The reasons it works so well are basically that:

• Only really confident men do this
• Only really dominant, sexual men do this
• It shakes a woman out of autopilot and brings her back into there here-and-now

Autopilot I just realized I haven’t written about on here yet; so let’s slate that as something to target in the near future. But for now, suffice it to say you don’t want women floating through their interactions with you without putting any mental footwork in. You want them making effort – albeit easy, natural effort – to be with you.

I met a really very cute and pretty 20 year old college student waiting in line for the bus today. We started talking and grabbed seats together – actually, we almost missed the bus, too engrossed in talking to each other as we were, until we suddenly realized everyone else had walked past us and boarded already!

Our conversation flowed smoothly, but I could tell she had just the slightest hint of reservation, though I did not know why. I was being quite calm and nice with her, and was relatively certain I wasn’t coming across too strongly, and I did my best to stay away from any overly high-value topics, aside from speaking a little French with her and discussing my impression of France while traveling there a few years back when she mentioned learning French and wanting to visit Paris. Even that might have been a little too much, but overall I estimated the benefit of having these additional things to bond on outweighed the danger of showing too much value.

It wasn’t until near the end of the bus ride, fifteen or twenty minutes after we had already exchanged contact information and tentatively discussed meeting this weekend, that she finally came out with what it was that was keeping her reserved. I was able to get to it by asking her some deeper emotional questions – she discussed not loving what she studied in college, so I asked her what she loved. She then told me that her boyfriend had been disappearing together with his ex-girlfriend and not taking her phone calls.

Yesterday on my way home, the bus I was riding on came to a stop with lots of young people – in particular, lots of young college age-looking women. My interest, needless to say, was piqued. As I sat in my seat, I watched everyone board the bus out of the corner of my eye… and then, I caught sight of a cute girl dressed very fashionably coming down the aisle. Ooh.

Now, when you’re already settled in somewhere, there aren’t a whole lot of ways you can get a woman to join you proactively. You might call out to her, of course – but this is chasing pretty hard and can hurt your chances, and you’ve probably got to be feeling rather bold to do it. If you are, and you want to try it, go for it; I wasn’t yesterday, but I still wanted that cute girl to take a seat next to me.

So I pulled out my trusty ol’ come hither eyes.

Talking today with an acquaintance of mine, we got to commenting on a couple we both knew and how they’d recently gotten together. The girl is a prim, proper girl who is more concerned with clothes and makeup than anything else, and the guy is a little bit of a rough-and-tumble cat from a poorer part of the world – but he’s pretty cocky and self-assured. My acquaintance was surprised the two of them ended up a pair; I wasn’t. “The bad girl got the bad boy,” I said, and he laughed and said that was a good way of putting it.

Maybe my mind was already working that way because of an article I read earlier today on Slate Magazine, called “Freaks, Geeks, and Economists: A study confirms every suspicion you ever had about high-school dating.” The article discusses a study in which, among other things, the term assertive mating is mentioned. Slate defines assortative mating as the tendency of individuals to select for mates similar to themselves; I did a quick look-up on Wikipedia to confirm. The tendency of individuals to select similar mates is known as positive assortative mating; individuals who select for dissimilar traits are referred to as practicing negative assortative mating.