(3) Journeyman

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.

I’ve just begun some very preliminary outlining for what I intend to be an audio CD product I’ll be releasing hopefully early 2011, to follow on the heels of How to Make Girls Chase, which ought to be coming out sometime in December if everything continues according to plan. The audio project is tentatively titled “Spellbinding”, and it’ll focus on how to connect rapidly with women and get out of something I call treading water – getting stuck in that maddening no-man’s land where you just can’t find anything interesting that you have in common with a girl to talk about, and you can feel her slipping away by the minute. If there’s one thing that drove me crazy for years, it was probably that.

Spellbinding was originally set to be my second audio product; I was going to focus first on one on targeting and figuring out which girls are likely to be most receptive to you. But after talking working with the topic of connecting and getting out of “treading water” with a good guy recently, I started feeling like this is probably an area that a lot of guys could benefit from some help on, so I’m pushing the schedule on Spellbinding up.

The same cool cat I spoke with about this topic sent me a follow up email with the following question:

I’m a huge proponent of comparison and analysis. One of the things I always look at is success rates, how women talk about guys, and how those guys treat women. Something funny I noticed a while back about some differences in how some men communicate with women versus how some other men communicate with women struck a chord with me, and I modified my communication accordingly. Since then, it’s been stronger and easier, and women chase me more.

Sounds like a magic bullet, no? In a way, it kind of is. So here’s the secret formula: take all those times and instances where you’re being ultra clever, and… scrap clever. Toss it in the trash heap.

One of the things I always look to guide men out of doing, whether I’m coaching them in-person or advising them via phone or Internet or just writing stuff for them to read, is being the entertainer. I touched on this a bit in Acting With Intent and Faux Pas of the Sociaux Nouveaux, and I really ought to write a proper post devoted mostly to this, but the problem in a nutshell with being the entertainer is that you get a lot of false positives.

Ever notice how fairytales and about ninety-nine out of a hundred romance tales you see or read are about how two people first got together? Cinderella meets her prince, against all odds, and he manages to find her again after he's lost her, against all odds, and the two of them ride off together in the carriage, into the dusky sunset. Prince Charming defeats the evil dragon to free Sleeping Beauty from her hundred-year slumber. Belle falls for Beast despite his unsavory appearance.

How come we don't start the story with Cinderella five years into her marriage with the prince? Why not pick up a decade after Sleeping Beauty woke up and Prince Charming and she made castle together? Why do we never see Belle and Beast after they've had their first couple of half-human, half-animal offspring?

It's because there's nothing exciting about that. We don't care about two people that've been together for years; that's old news. We want to know about the new and exciting things that are going on: those two people who might get together – who should get together – but who still may not get together.

Physical escalation is a subject that’s a bit under-discussed in the world of seduction. This is probably for a combination of reasons – most of the men who are studying seduction aren’t running into scenarios all that often where they’re escalating physically, and most of the men who are decent enough at it don’t hear enough questions or concerns about this topic to bother sharing some of their secrets.