(5) Master

Men don’t build attraction in women gradually. Raised attraction comes in spurts – and when lost, it’s lost in disappointing spurts (or collapses), too.

How do some men take a woman who’s barely interested in them and make her fall in love?

How do so many other men manage to turn women who were attracted to them into women who no longer are?

When you approach a new woman, she’ll normally have certain defenses in place. Understanding this romantic defense is vital for the savvy romantic pursuer.

Quick caveat: this article is one on seduction theory / underlying principles, rather than more tactical material. I’ll cover some tactics in it toward the end as well, but just a heads up that in this piece we’re looking more at the overarching nature of the dynamic in seduction. We’ll return to more typical stuff in the next article. On with the piece…

Today, we’ll be talking about the receptive/pursued party in a seduction as the ‘defender’. The ‘defense’ mentioned here is defense against pursuit and seduction by the pursuer. This does not mean the ‘defender’ doesn’t want the seduction to happen (the defender may!). We’ll discuss what that means as we get into it.

In every courtship you will have, there are only three possibilities:

1. You are the pursuer, and the woman is the defender.

2. The woman is the pursuer, and you are the defender.

3. Both parties are equally interested and exactly on the same page.

#3 most men will experience most often with girls they meet who they want to ask out, where the girl also wants them to ask her out. These approaches seem so straightforward as to not be like the normal courtship process at all – and in fact, they aren’t (due to the complete lack of resistance). Less commonly, you may experience it with women who are as certain they want to hook up with you as you are with them, or equally as certain they want a relationship with you as you are them.

The rest of the time, one of the parties is going to be the pursuer, while the other party is the defender. Whichever party is taking more assertive, aggressive action is the pursuer. Whichever party stands back is the defender.

The defender decides if the pursuer can proceed forward; the pursuer is responsible for maintaining the forward movement of the seduction and figuring out ways to get the defender’s defenses lowered so the seduction can move forward.

If one of the parties is showing resistance, that party is the defender. If one of the parties is overcoming resistance, that party is the pursuer.

Normally it’s probably more helpful for the man’s psychology while in a seduction to frame seductions as mostly mutual, or a dance, etc. However, there are some concepts we can really only discuss with the framing of pursuit and defense.

For today’s article, we’ll temporarily set aside some of the more helpful mentalities, more conducive to a seductive mindset, to think about these aspects of seduction in a more revealing light.

Some seductions aim squarely at consummation. Yet many have limited goals: to socialize, to flirt, to practice. Why does this difference in seductive intent exist?

Many moons ago, I noticed a rather curious phenomenon:

I’m a better seducer with girls I’m strongly attracted to.

When I’m really, really into a girl, I:

• Assert a much stronger presence

• Am much more present & engaged

• Behave in more attractive ways

• Game at a higher, sharper level

• Persist more, and more confidently

I’ve always spent a lot of time observing myself, looking for things I do naturally when I am ‘on’, then seeking to replicate them consciously when I am ‘off’. To a certain extent you very much can… but only to that extent. Beyond it, you simply have to be ‘on’.

I didn’t know if this was just me, but once I started digging into the science on dating and attraction, I found studies that seemed to support it. For instance, some studies on men’s voices find that change the way they speak when speaking to attractive women, and that third party observers rate the voice men use when speaking to attractive women to be a more attractive voice.

(women do this too, raising their voice pitches to people they find more attractive. A higher voice pitch is rated as more feminine and more attractive in women)

Having spent time in this space, I’ve also had many men lament that they perform much better with girls they’re really into – and why can’t they perform that way all the time?

It raises the question: if you perform with peak seductive prowess for women you’re very attracted to, why can’t you perform at peak prowess for women you aren’t? The end goal is the same after all – to achieve sexual intimacy – isn’t it?

Or is it?

For the average man, dating is fraught with emotion. Rejection stings, and success elates. Yet what of the veteran dater? For him, it’s far more depersonalized.

One of the great differences between an experienced seducer and an ordinary man is what we might call the “depersonalization” of seduction.

For Joe Average, each encounter with an attractive woman is a deeply personal affair. He experiences a range of powerful positive and negative emotions whenever a woman he desires (and often even one he doesn’t) seems to approve of or reject him.

Happy interactions with women sending him over the moon, beaming with hope, pride, and victory; rejections, on the other hand, crumple him, turning him sour, beaten, resentful.

Yet for the experienced seducer, women’s reactions to him are not personal. The experience he creates for women feels more personal for the women than what they experience with Joe Average, by far… Nevertheless for the seducer himself, the seduction is merely a process he’s run many times before. The outcome of any individual interaction carries little emotional weight for him – often none at all.

It’s not that his emotions have “vanished”; rather, it is that they have moved… Instead of being affected by the slings and arrows of courtship that elevate or sink more ordinary men, the seducer’s emotions are focused somewhere else. The seduction process itself for him has become depersonalized.

This depersonalization offers enormous benefits to the experienced seducer… not the least of which are far higher success rates with women (due to him being able to act unclouded by emotion), plus far lower rates of the heartache, bitterness, and disappointment ordinary men so often experience in their dealings with women.

Depersonalizing seduction is thus a very worthwhile aim for novice and intermediate seducers. But can you do that, any way other than just putting in enough approaches to get there?

People become hooked to things that give them specific social rewards. A good seduction follows the same principle, weaving a delicious romantic spiderweb.

What's it take to create a masterful seduction... one that pulls a woman in and magnetizes her to you, all the way to intimacy?

Talented seducers do something different from what ordinary daters do.

Well, they do many things different, but we're talking about one in particular today:

They construct a path of rewarding social/romantic experiences for women to encounter as they proceed through the course of the seduction with them.

Each step of the seduction journey reinforces to the woman how good it feels to be a part of the seduction, how much she wants to be around this man, and why she must continue.

This 'spiderweb of rewards', built well, keeps a woman hooked into the seduction, a thing that feels so good she does not want to leave.

If you can get yourself to think of seduction as a 'reward generation machine', you will begin to think of it the way all master seducers do.

When you find yourself in a conflict, you can back down… or you can escalate. How far should you take it? How do you know what the right thing to do is? A few simple rules can guide you.

I recently binge-read a series of colorful Quora answers from ex-convict Matthew Holmes. Holmes was someone who grew up, more or less, inside the US penitentiary system, and shares advice on how to survive the hostile conditions there. He contrasts the prison world with the outside world; inside the prison system, a prisoner's life is a Hobbesian war of all-against-all, where there is no real law and no one you can trust to have your back but you.

One of the many repeating sentiments in Holmes's prison advice is you must be prepared to defend your reputation at any time, and go to almost any length to do so. Holmes stopped short of killing anyone in prison (as doing so would've added an automatic life sentence to his 10-year term), but came close to it on several occasions, where he severely beat inmates who tried to fight or rob from him.

In terms of general principles, I'd call his approach to conflict "always escalate a confrontation until you win."

For some time, I've followed 'always escalate' as a general (but not absolute) rule. I generally follow it with:

• Girlfriend drama
• Some business disputes
• Some physical confrontations
• Moral high ground debates
• Any kind of interpersonal argument

However, the real world isn't a penitentiary. It is not (for the most part) a Hobbesian situation of all-against-all.

Thus, much of the time, you will not want to continue escalating to the extremes in real life situations. In many cases it's counterproductive; the gains you get from continuing to escalate outweigh the costs.

Today I want to talk about the 'always escalate' philosophy -- which is one I've long found helpful -- and where the limits are to it where you decide to hop off that train and not always escalate.