Tactics Tuesdays

Byronic flaws make a man more interesting, and much more bondable in courtships and relationships. Yet there’s an art to revealing them that many men often get wrong...

I recently worked with a hard case guy on a repeated relationship problem he has. Periodically, his relationships fail, inexplicably to him, with every woman he dates peeling off and wanting out.

He's been unable to understand why, but with this latest girl she gave him a lot of very clear feedback, that also mirrors feedback he's gotten from other girlfriends, as well as mirrors my own feeling personally with him.

That feedback was this:

That the girl, despite six months of trying to peel back his layers, was never able to get to know the real him. She feels like, after six months of attempts, she's still right back where she started with him, and is tired of trying.

This is a guy who, in most on-paper respects, should be a desirable guy. He's tall, accomplished, has good fundamentals, and good game. He's well-nigh unshakeable in his frame and is relentlessly optimistic (without being unrealistic). He's an ex-military man and is tough-as-nails, yet is also a religious man and is caring and intelligent, if sometimes not always totally attuned to why a woman is doing what she's doing.

What I realized on looking at how this latest girlfriend quit the relationship is that he isn't letting women peel his layers back properly, and this is causing women to feel like they don't even really know him.

Which in turn causes those women to feel like failures, then causes them to leave.

What I said to him was, "You need to help women peel your layers back properly. You might also need to get more comfortable yourself showing people more of whom you are underneath your armor."

Your girlfriend is hinting she wants to get more serious. But she won’t ask outright and you won’t go out on a limb yourself. How do you not chase – or ignore?

It's always a bit fraught dealing with the "how much does this person like me?" "how serious should this relationship be?" question.

You'll notice most people of both sexes will dance around this issue. There's a lot of tentative feeling out of the other partner. Both sexes hesitate a lot, miscommunicate, and make incorrect assumptions.

There's a reason for this: by being the first to put yourself out there and 'show all your cards' in a relationship you run the risk of all kinds of unpleasant things:

• Maybe the other person doesn't like you as much, and feels like you're coming on too strong when you do

• Maybe the other person likes you a lot more, and feels disappointed at how uninterested you seem to be

• Maybe you totally misread the other person and actually s/he was happy the way things were and didn't want the relationship to escalate

Any kind of escalation of commitment is in fact a minefield where it's all too easy for any misalignment between the parties to blow the whole thing up.

So it's no wonder this is a difficult step for your average relationship.

However... there is a little tactic you can use to navigate this step a lot more fluidly.

Paradiastole is a technique for reframing criticism into trophies. That vice of yours? Hey, look on the bright side! At least it means you (something good). That’s paradiastole.

"You shouldn't say something like that to a woman!" a girl recently told me, half-tickled, half-irate. "It shows you have low EQ!"

"Well, least I'm honest," I said. "Just think how bad it'd be if I was low EQ and I wasn't honest!"

I use this kind of reframe a lot. There's a name for it: it's called 'paradiastole'.

(my EQ's pretty good, by the way)

Paradiastole is a way to reframe a criticism into something positive, in a playful and humorous way. It deflects the other person's judgment, often with a bit of moderate self-deprecation.

If you don't do this, or you don't do it enough, it's a handy little tactic you can add to your arsenal.

Dominant, sexually attractive men take up space in their environments and touch the things around them. They look cool, comfortable, and confident where they are.

I was at the gym yesterday (my condolences to those of you in areas where they have barred your gyms and locked you in your homes). In between workouts I was doing my usual arm movements to stay limber, or leaning on equipment/benches for a breather.

I noticed a lot of guys in between sets would just kind of stand around, or maybe sit somewhere. The effect was I ended up commanding more of the space around me than these guys commanded around them.

This wasn't something I was doing intentionally. I don't really care if people think I'm an ALPHA MALE in the gym. The gym I go to is fairly hardcore and there aren't a lot of women there (so it's not like I'll be picking up there... though I do also like gyms that are good for pickup).

The observation got me thinking about something I always tell guys to work on with their fundamentals, but hadn't talked about in a while: take up space and touch things in your environment.

This is something that all dominant men do, usually without thought.

It is a very visible cue to a man's personal feeling of comfort in and control over his environment. You can just look at whether a guy is doing this to very rapidly figure out how 'at home' he is wherever he is and whether he feels like it's 'his' environment.

Women look at this too, and it influences their attraction to you.

If you take her from the setting you seduced her in to one that’s very different, you risk disrupting your seduction. Keep an eye on environments as you pull/change venues.

One of the biggest mood-killers in a seduction is when the setting changes.

Every guy who's been around the seduction block has encountered this during transitions.

You meet a girl somewhere (let's say at a bar), and the vibe is great. She's connected with you, laughing with you, the flirtation is strong. There's a strong sexual vibe.

Then you take her out of there. You go to a diner. The two of you chill. The vibe comes down.

You head out onto the street to hail a ride back together. "You know what, I'm just going to go home I think," she tells you.

You try to get her to stick around: "No, no! The car's almost here. We'll just go back for 30 minutes. It'll be a great time, I promise."

But she bails anyway.

What happened?

You know (you could feel it) that if there'd been some way to shag this girl in the bar you met her at, she would absolutely have been yours.

However, there wasn't. You tried taking her to the diner, then home, and somewhere along the way things lost steam.

This will not always happen. Sometimes you can maintain the vibe across settings.

Nevertheless, if you want to maximize your odds to get the girl, keep the setting constant.

Your first time in bed goes a long way toward determining whether a woman sees you again. But it’s not about your technical performance. It’s about how you make her feel.

I'm seeing a lot of cases recently where guys are laying girls, giving mediocre performances in bed, then not being able to get those girls out again.

They message them for a while, and the girls message back less and less enthusiastically, less and less frequently.

Eventually these girls drop off their radars altogether.

There are some common themes I'm seeing in both why these girls drop off and why the guys in question can't get them back.

I started this article wanting to talk about follow-up strategies, and I may get around to that.

But as I got into it, it occurred to me that really the core problem is how guys are behaving with women in the bedroom.

So instead, in today's article, I want to give the reader some tactics he can use to reverse this trend in his own seductions, in the bedroom, and retain more of the women he takes to bed.

Do you keep running into the same objections? Construct frames that circumvent these (and increase your odds by 3-5%).

I know a guy who always struggles with chemistry with women.

He doesn't do things exactly quite right. He uses all the right tactics and techniques with women, but he uses them in this way that is just a little bit 'off'.

When you try to point it out to him, he insists that in fact he is doing everything correctly. Then he says it must be a problem with the technique or that the technique doesn't work for him.

Regardless the reason, he constantly runs into issues where he has what he thinks is a great date, followed by the woman telling him at the end of it (or texting him later on) that she "just isn't feeling it."

"There's no chemistry," she says. Or "I didn't feel a spark."

I can't get him to fix the vibe/calibration issues. He doesn't see these as a real problem, probably because he's unable to pick up on this issue himself, even when women point it out or coaches point it out.

However, I wanted to help him, so gave him a tool I knew he could use: a 3% frame to help push things his way in those edge cases where it could go either way, but "I'm not feeling a spark" is the deciding factor.