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What do these men have in common?

• The wealthy investment banker or self-made multimillionaire business owner lounging in the VIP section of the nightclub with bottles of champagne, or skating about town in his brightly colored Lamborghini.

• The sexy Mediterranean man, a silky accent rolling off of his Spanish or Italian or Greek lips, a specific flair about him that makes him seem rich with experience, intrigue, and hints of the romantic.

• The enigmatic artist, a lone writer or fervent painter, who exists outside the system – neither retail worker nor manual laborer nor cubicle desk jockey, but creative, tortured soul consumed by his demons, and by a passion few keep past their first decade of life.

All these men have various different things going for them that trigger an assortment of different attraction triggers in women:

• Conspicuous consumption, in the case of the wealthy man in VIP or a sports car

• The novelty effect, in the case of the sexy Mediterranean man

• Byronic characteristics, in the case of the flawed, creative artist

Yet, there is also something about each man that the majority of men a woman meets lacks.

It is not something he is, so much...

It is something he offers her.

This thing he offers her is an adventure – one of romance, one of excitement, one of the unknown. One that seems to step right out of the romance novels women turn the pages of with ardor when no one is around to watch them (frequently slipping a hand delicately into their panties as they do so).

Adventure is the great equalizer, and it is the reason you will see overweight, balding, non-rich men ending up with women that trim, good-looking, well-off men struggle to get. Not because the former man is better, per se... but because he offered her something the latter may not have even known was important to bother offering.

I want to make a brief side trip from seduction today to talk about a broader social distinction you will run into that it’s vitally important to understand.

That is the distinction between artificial hierarchies and personal appeal.

In the broader social arena, when it comes to getting hired on jobs, or dealing with legal issues, or negotiating mano-e-mano, or differentiating even between social circle game and cold approach pickup, you’ll find that most people seem to be stronger in one area – navigating and leveraging artificial hierarchies, or appealing to and swaying individuals personally – than they are the other.

And when you’re in your element, you will often find things easier; conversely, when you’re out of it, things will often become fiendishly hard and you will not know why.

The reason why frequently is because you’re trying to achieve your objectives using the wrong strategy for the situation at hand... because each of these two types of power structures require very different approaches.

Very few people ever come to grasp this well enough to move fluidly back and forth between the two.

A reader named Konstantin writes in:

“Hi Chase and the team!

I have read most of your articles, and especially those on moving fast and inviting her home. I have a question: it happened to me quite a few times now that I invite a girl home with me, and she gets ever so close to coming, but changes her mind at the last moment, and there's nothing I can do to change her mind back. Just tonight, actually, she was giving me some resistance, but got off the subway at the stop next to mine. But when "our" train was arriving, she suddenly said, once again, that she should go home, and after three "no"s I let her go. I knew for a fact that she liked me, but what did I do wrong that prevented that last push from happening? If you can answer that in a post or an email, that would be very much appreciated.”

Few things in seduction are quite as irritating as having a girl you’ve spent an hour or two or more talking to and working with and navigating around countless social obstacles bail on you 2 yards from the goal line.

It feels like you’ve been suckered... that whole night, which you had already checked off as “in the bag”, in an instant goes 180 degrees and becomes a fruitless night.

Most of the time, when you have a girl bail on you like this, you will never, ever hear from her again, either. You switch from being about to become lovers, and possibly entering into each other’s lives for a long time hereafter if you both really get along pretty well and want to keep seeing one another, to being a couple of strangers it didn’t work out with (and you’re some guy she “almost made a big mistake” with).

So what do you do when a girl won’t go home with you?

If you are like most guys you probably have thought at one point or another that attraction is like a switch, and once it switches on it is on forever. But what might surprise you is that the reality is totally counter to your expectations.

The startling truth is that a woman’s need for you to keep her attracted is actually very similar to a thirst, and she needs it refilled every time you interact with her (not just once). If you are clever you will realise that the best long term plan – just like a thirst – will require a well to be dug and water to be pumped and delivered on a consistent basis.

Don’t let this image scare you however, I just mean to imply that attraction has to become a consistent thing that you uphold with actions every day rather than an objective you meet once and are done with.

Conventional wisdom states that once you “ask her out”, “marry her”, or get an “in for sex” that it is game set and match, but this is just simply false, and girls will ALWAYS change their minds unless you are consistently attractive. If you have a mindset that runs off the belief that you only need her approval ONCE, throw it out the window and change your view immediately.

In essence, women are much like any other thing worth getting right in life, they take passion and a great work ethic to do right, and once you adopt that “work ethic” you can consistently rebuild and maintain attraction all day long. So if you want to never have to guess again at IF she likes you, you have to set your mind to changing your expectations and go from a “set and forget” guy, to a guy that applies himself consistently.

I’ve been relistening to Nassim Taleb’s wonderful book Fooled by Randomness, which is a probabalist’s dream read. And if there’s one thing that picking up girls turns you into, it’s a probabalist.

Reading it (or listening to it on audio, as I am), you see a great many parallels between stock trading and seduction. And you also come to understand why some men succeed at picking up lots of different pretty girls, and why most men never will.

In many things in life, but especially in trading and in pickup, there is what you’d call an asymmetric distribution of returns. And that means that by participating in trading for stocks or picking up girls or anything else with an asymmetric distribution, you’re opening yourself up to asymmetric returns.

But the mind does not take well naturally to asymmetric returns. It doesn’t grasp them. It isn’t built to work that way.

And the result of this is, an endless abundance of great returns for those few souls willing to go against the grain, fight the emotions that go with it, and chase down their asymmetric returns in spite of their struggling and fearful or frustrated brains... and an endless source of frustration and disappointment for the majority of souls who just go with the flow.

Growing up, I was shown again and again in film, books, and television that there was precisely one (1) path a man could follow with women, romantically-speaking: date a few people, find the right girl, and settle down.

This never sat entirely right with me, because while I enjoyed the idea of pairing up intensely with some amazing woman, my tastes also changed enough that I also enjoyed fantasizing about pairing up with lots of different amazing women. Not all at once (what a headache!), but mostly more or less one after another. Maybe having children with the different various amazing women along the way. Even while fixated on that one special girl, I could never imagine more than a year or two out into a relationship with her... sort of like most Hollywood films. The movie in my head always ended after the exciting part.

When I discovered the seduction community, I found two more beliefs about how relationships could go, coexisting rather uncomfortably side-by-side with that first. Plenty of men learning how to get girls still aimed for a settled life with one girl they’d commit to more or less forever; some of them because of a lack of abundance mentality, but many of them because that was just what they really wanted, and the cultural narrative gelled with their own intrinsic desires.

Those other two views on relationships are the ones I want to discuss today. I won’t go much into the conventional mainstream view of relationships – you already know that one plenty well enough (and, for the record, I think it’s a perfectly fine and doable path for those who want it), so instead, I want to talk about the other two:

1. The “Committed Relationships are Bad for Men” View, and
2. The “Committed Relationships are Playgrounds for Men” View

... and I’ll also talk about where both of these views come from, and how and why your lifestyle radically colors your perception of relationships.

Alex writes in with a question about a follow-up article to the one on precedent: “Dating and Relationship Precedent: Why It’s So Very Important.” Here's his email:

“Hi Chase and friends at girlschase.com

Your articles are amazing! I found Chase's article on precedent to be thought-provoking:

http://www.girlschase.com/
content/dating-and-relationship-precedent-why-it’s-so-very-important

I was wondering if you guys think writing a secondary article on how to recover after precedent has been set poorly would be a good follow-up idea.

For example: Say with this particular girl, I've moved too slowly with her, been overly helpful, white-knighted her, and acted overly insecure. As a result, I ended up losing her. But what if I want a second chance? Do you have any suggestions on bouncing back after setting poor precedent?

I know it would be best to move on, and I wish I knew about setting good precedent back when I was inexperienced, but sometimes I just want a second shot. I think it would be excellent to have an article on bouncing back after poor precedent, if possible.

Let me know if you guys think this would be a good suggestion!

Best,
Alex”

This is a sticky issue, and it's not one with an easy fix... not even a remotely easy fix. It's also a totally irrational problem to have, in the grand scheme of things, and it's one that's rooted firmly into a scarcity mentality of some sort or another - it may be that you don't feel you can ever meet another girl as amazing as this one (you lack absolute abundance), or it may be that you don't know if you're ever going to find another girl at ALL (just a complete lack of abundance mentality) - or, at the very least, you've just plunged so much time and emotional investment into this girl that your psyche won't let you let go.

The rational option is always, "Go out, forget about the girl you've dug yourself into a deep pit of despair with, get more skilled with women, upgrade your game and your fundamentals, and go date and sleep with 10 more women hotter, cooler, and more interesting than this one."

Yet, it's a question that comes up SO MUCH from guys, that it's probably worth addressing on its own: how do you change a girl's perception of you when it's already pretty low?

It will require you to move mountains and pull off feats that few men ever have, but if you're willing to give it your all, I may as well lay out the tools for you. So, by popular request...