Opening

I'm kicking off a new weekly blog post series today, that's going to center on brief, informative articles focused on one specific technique you can use to achieve greater success with meeting and dating women. I'm calling this new series Tactics Tuesdays.

In today's edition -- our inaugural one -- I want to have a look at the technique of locking in.

When I first stumbled upon the pick up community, I heard the term "lock in" or the instruction to "get locked in" tossed about fairly often. And to me, it sounded silly and overmuch -- another vestige of the old indirect days of picking up girls, like opinion openers and routines.

Then I moved to San Diego, and acquired a new friend and wingman who was doing outstandingly with girls, and who I noticed made it a point of his game to always lock in. It was the first time I'd seen it done effectively.

About two years later in mid-2009, I partnered Girls Chase with a talented San Diego-based date coach named Mateo (who just launched his new website, Live the Knight Life; congrats to him!), and I observed that, again, here was a guy for whom locking in was a pretty essential part of his approach with women. And like my other pal, I noticed he was having a discernibly easier time more often than not on his initial approaches.

"Well, okay," I said to myself, "this looks like something I need to stop being so closed-minded about, and start doing."

So, lock in I did.

A few conversations I've had lately have revolved around me discussing with guys how simple things are with women. You just talk to them, and then... boom! They chase after you. You don't even have to do any work; girls take care of all that themselves.

Because that's how it's been for me lately. But I keep getting pulled back down to reality; guys confess it doesn't work that way for them. And then I stop and think, and for a long time it didn't work that way for me, either.

What changed it for me? Well, one of the biggest factors was figuring out what to say to girls. All you've got to do is get that figured out, and you're set.

But that's tough, you say. Why? Well, because you're not a girl. And if you're like a lot of guys out there, you have, starting out, no idea what it is women want to hear, what they like to hear, or what they need to hear, whatsoever.

Here's how it goes for most guys: they start out talking to women too literally, and the women get bored out of their skulls and leave. So then a guy tries a few witty pick up lines, or he tries busting on girls to be a challenge, only to have them start snapping at him and shutting down. Eventually he comes full circle again and decides to try to be a lot nicer than he was, only to find that, once again, the challenge has disappeared and the interest women showed at least some of the time when he was being a jerk has disappeared.

That's the point a guy realizes that, despite all the time he might've spent trying to get better with women, he still has no real idea about what to say to girls.

Argh.

Fortunately, all's not lost, and you can figure it out. In fact, that's why I made this post -- it's something of a guide on the wild, woolly world of talking to girls. In other words, herein lies the machete you'll need to hack a path through the conversational jungle and emerge on the other side with that beautiful, smiling girl you've had your eye on.

Walking back from the gym this afternoon, under the hot summer sun, I was a bit of a mess. My shirt was drenched in sweat; my arms were stiff and wooden; my hair was a little messy; and I was still breathing a little heavy.

I noticed a girl walking toward me, dressed in rather fancy garb, and as she saw me, she pulled her face into a mildly contorted look that spoke somewhat of disgust. But, at the same time, she also couldn't seem to take her eyes off of me, and I noticed those eyes scanning me up and down; she brushed her hair back, and as she walked toward me, she ever so slightly veered toward me.

I've met lots of girls like this before. Girls that, on first glance, might appear to be completely put off by you. But if you read between the lines, their more subtle actions tell a different story. In fact, I've taken some of these women who gazed upon me with what looked like disgust as lovers, oftentimes rather quickly.

What I want to get across here is, how to tell if a girl likes you -- or not -- isn't always as cut and dry a case as you might think.

Sometimes it can even be the opposite of what you initially thought -- and that holds for both the girls you think like you, and the girls you think don't.

A buddy of mine recently asked me to write on how to meet girls in groups, as it's something I don't talk about a great deal on here. The most I've touched on the topic before has been in "Breaking Circle," the post on maintaining attraction despite distractions around you or even other people trying interrupt you.

But, as my friend noted, I haven't gotten a proper treatment on meeting women in groups up yet, so this is it.

Meeting girls in groups is one of those things that, assuming you're doing much nighttime approaching, you're going to run into reasonably regularly. In fact, it may very well be the meat and potatoes of your approaches -- you might just find yourself in groups most of the time.

Groups aren't ideal, of course. Things tend to move faster and more smoothly the majority of the time when it's just you and your girl, and there are no interruptions or distractions to knock the two of you off course.

However, when handled appropriately, any negatives of groups can usually be negated, and in fact you can sometimes even get groups working for you with the women you meet. So it doesn't always have to be unfortunate that that pretty girl you like is in the middle of a group -- sometimes groups make it even easier for the two of you to get together.

1. Keep it short,
2. Help her think, and
3. Walk a mile in her shoes.

I don't usually start off a post with the impact points right at the beginning. But I want to lay these out first -- because they're so vital to solid message writing -- and we'll get into the "whys" and the "hows" in a moment.

I was going to write about something else today -- I have a couple of big-concept posts I've been meaning to write up and get around to -- but, heck, the last post I put up was a big-concept post so I figured let's have a quick breather from that and get something a little lighter up first.

This topic came up as I got to an email from a reader. A very well-spoken and clearly an educated guy, he sent me a message detailing a situation with a girl he knew... and boy, was it detailed. I mean, it was long. Really long.

I've been all too guilty of this myself -- sending super-long messages. And what I found was that I was often disappointed -- I'd put all this time and effort into a monster of a message, and then... I'd get no response.

There are a bunch of lessons I eventually took away from those experiences that I'll share with you today. The basic gist of today's post is, basically, that this -- what we're about to talk about -- is how you write online dating messages and emails that don't get ignored... and, in fact, get you exactly what you want: responses, phone numbers, dates, and success.

Yesterday I went out with a guy I mentor, and he asked to watch me do some direct daytime approaches.

"Sure, no problem," I told him.

I scouted around for a while, and saw a really cute girl walking along, wearing a blue blouse and big sunglasses, apparently looking for a taxi, her cell phone in hand. Usually I don't go for women who are visibly occupied like that -- taxi-searching and texting / calling, as her headspace is going to be elsewhere -- but I wasn't seeing all that many cute girls around solo, so up I went.

"I saw you walking here, and I had to come tell you," I began -- and she put her hand up and waved me off. "...that you're incredibly cute. I'm Chase," I finished. She waved me off again. I walked next to her, matching her stride.

"What's your name, then?" I asked, sticking my hand in her direction. She smiled, turned her head away, and waved me off again.

"I'm sure you've got to be called something," I said. "Your friends don't just call you this [I demonstrated waving], right?" She cracked a bigger smile, laughed, and kept walking.

The other day I had a reader send me a question about body positioning during opening: is it better to open over your shoulder, he wanted to know, or facing toward the girl?

It's a somewhat confusing topic, actually, and one I've seen a lot of guys struggling with when they're starting out. They walk up to meet a new girl, but they have their bodies positioned all wrong and the opener goes a little awkwardly -- or worse, the girl even ignores them outright. Having the wrong body positioning when you say "hi" can be downright make or break for your success with a new woman. So the question of how to position yourself -- whether opening full body or opening over your shoulder -- is actually a very good question to ask.

And... the answer to that question? Well, like so many things in the social and seductive arts: it depends.

You'll find that either of the different body positionings is effective in different scenarios. Further, you'll find that the exact angle you give to a girl is going to be different depending on the girl and the situation. It is, like most of seduction, nuanced, and it's an art.