Tactics Tuesdays

What do you do when a girl tests you and you’re suddenly out of your depth? Sidestep! The sidestep lets you avoid all manner of traps, snares, and pitfalls.

The sidestep: it’s an incredibly powerful move and the antidote for a lot of men’s problems when facing resistance.

When a man encounters a wall in a conversation or with a girl, his first reaction is either to give up or to push past the resistance. The flaw in giving up is obvious: neither of you win. You don’t show up to play the game, and it’s over.

The flaw with pushing past resistance is that most guys do it in a needy or overly aggressive way.

They concede to her way of thinking and find a way to please her or assuage her concern.

Or, if they do choose to face her frame head to head, they attempt to strong-arm her emotions at a much more severe emotional level than that at which she resisted. Their brute conversational force scares her off.

Instead, when a man faces resistance, he should consider sidestepping or moving around the obstacle rather than wrestling against it, which usually leaves either your two egos broken.

Parry her loving strikes.

But before we get into the how-to, allow me to illustrate how badly you can embarrass yourself when you try to outmaneuver a much more dominant and socially savvy girl... By sharing with you perhaps one of my most shameful stories.

You’ve met a girl, it’s going fine, and then you just... Eject, too soon. You leave too early. You beat yourself up about it later – but what could you have done then?

Want a simple way to get more success out of your dates, courtships, pickups, etc.?

Here it is: don’t eject so fast.

Early ejection plagues beginners in seduction. And the wound is a self-inflicted one.

This sound at all familiar?:

You got up the nerve to approach a girl. She’s cute. Real cute. Your heart rate is going 200 beats per minute. And it’s going okay. She smiled when you walked up, she said “hello”, and now she’s responding to your questions and asking you some back. You make a light joke and she laughs. Yet the pressure just builds and builds. Finally, you excuse yourself: “All right, well, it was nice to meet you!” And then you leave.

You didn’t ask her out; you didn’t take her phone number. Things were going okay, but then you bailed. You had to hit the eject button.

Why does this happen? Well, fear, mostly.

What can you do about it? Well, we’re going to talk about that.

If you need to move things along on a date or in a pickup but it’s too soon to take her home, often the next best option is to change venues.

At times you’ll have things going well with a girl, but not well enough yet you’re ready to take her home. Even still, you reach one of those moments in the courtship where, like it or not, you’ve got to move her.

Moving her around in the same venue won’t work at this point. It works terrific early on, but you’re too far along for it now and it’ll feel like you’re treading water... or even going backwards.

You need movement, but you can’t stay there. And you can’t take her home. So what can you do?

You change venues. One venue to another venue.

The venue change is a handy tool in both dates and pickups. It’s a vital element of instant dates, structured dates, and often many guys’ one-night stand processes. But it’s also a tactic rife with potential to drop the ball.

Take her to the wrong place, and you kill the vibe.

Fail to handle the transition well, and you kill the vibe.

Misread her desires and change venues when she really wanted you to just take her home, and you risk missing the escalation window, and kill the vibe.

So let’s arm you with a few tools to let you read her right, take her to the right spot, and make your venue change as likely to lead to a pull home at the end of your date or pickup as anything else.

You load a barbell one side at a time. The most effective way to improve with girls is to use the same approach: one side at a time, then the other.

There is one thing that bugged me more than anything else when going out with someone new to hit on girls, and I never realized it till a few months back, and only then did I begin to put it into words.

Odds are, if you go out to talk to women, you do this at least some of the time too. Most guys do. And it’s bad for you. I’ll tell you what the thing is in a moment, but first, let me tell you about Seneca’s Barbell.

A month ago I read Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. In it, Taleb highlights the problem I noticed guys running into when I’d go out with them to chat up girls. The solution for this problem is what Taleb terms “Seneca’s Barbell”.

The idea behind Seneca’s Barbell is that when you work on part A of a two-part project, focus just on A; when you work on part B of that project, focus just on B. Do not work half and half on A and B at the same time, because you divvy up your attention between foci and prevent yourself doing either effectively.

As Taleb puts it, think of a barbell used by a bodybuilder. When he prepares the barbell, the bodybuilder places the weights on either side of the bar, not in the middle. Engage and become fully consumed with one side, then be fully consumed with the other. Never try to do both at once. Use your focus to its fullest.

Let me explain how this idea applies to picking up women.

You shouldn’t join a girl’s shopping expedition for a date. So why’s it okay to invite her along while YOU shop? The difference is the dynamic.

In my article on The “Help Run Some Errands” Date, Lawliet questions whether having a girl come help you on dates doesn’t set too much of a boyfriend frame.

As we’ve talked about before, you very much do not want to be the early boyfriend. If you act like her boyfriend before you sleep with her, you will almost never sleep with her. We’ve even talked about the misfortune that fell one poor man who decided it’d be a good idea to take a girlfriend of mine shopping and go around holding her bags for her.

So why, then, would I turn around and propose you take girls shopping with you?

Have I flipped my gourd?

Gone stark mad?

No, don’t worry. If this distinction confuses you, it won’t for long.

That’s because in today’s article, we’re going to draw a line between what happens when you help her versus when she helps you.

Gold diggers can be a problem, especially if you’re richer than the girls you’re meeting. However, there are two (2) ways to reliably screen them out.

In my discussion of the belief some guys hold that “women are evil”, a reader named SBM asks:

“The question is though, how do you screen for gold-diggers? How can you find out whether or not a girl you’re taking out on a date is in fact a gold-digger?”

It’s a good question!

I, for one, love girls who are sexy, fashionable, and confident. These are tempting qualities for me in any girl. However, one of the drawbacks of qualities like this is that they’re often – perhaps even most often – found in gold diggers.

And while I’m not wealthy enough to attract top-flight gold diggers looking for a payout all of the time, I dress well enough that I get approached by them sometimes in the U.S. (particularly in Las Vegas, that seedy den of predatory gold digging paradise). And I run into them in Eastern Europe and Asia.

Some guys like gold diggers, or are comfortable with the exchange gold diggers want. If you’re such a guy, who thinks it’s perfectly reasonable for a girl to trade her looks for your resources and financial security, this article won’t be of much interest to you. Or maybe it will be, as a kind of reverse technique. Just do the opposite of it and you’ll attract the gold diggers and repel the girls who don’t believe in this trade.

However, if you’re like me, and you dislike the foundation gold digging rests upon, then read on, and let’s talk how to screen these girls out.

You hit it off with a girl, or have a wonderful date. Then, suddenly, she has to go. You can avoid this, yet, with better time management.

Ever meet a girl on a bus or train and have a nice little chat, but before you could take her number, she stood up and said, “This is my stop,” and suddenly rushed out the door?

Or you took a girl on a date, with things going swell, only for you to try to take her home but find out she had somewhere she had to be in 45 minutes?

How you manage your time on your dates and in courtships, conversations, and pickups is key. You already know how crucial it is to move faster, hit escalation windows, and get the girl before attraction expires. But at the micro level, you must be able to manage the details of time management, too.

There are two parts of that battle:

1. The knowledge of how much time you have with her
   
2. The strategy around how best to use that time
   

The stronger you are on each aspect of courtship time management, the more success your courtships will bring you.