Fundamentals

When I first decided to start tackling women and dating as a skill set to methodically improve at the end of 2004, I went into it with three distinct aims:

• Be a seductive, charming bad boy,
• Constantly test the limits and push to improve, and
• Make women feel special.

I didn't know exactly what I was doing or how my learning curve would look, but I trusted that as I chipped away at learning the ability to do better with women, I would indeed get it down, as I had a diverse array of other skills.

It wasn't until a year later that I found the pick up community. Many parts of it excited me; I couldn't believe there was an entire group of men who'd worked to develop this same skill set too, some much further along than myself. But there was one part that mystified me:

These guys didn't seem to know how to make a girl feel special.

So much of their stuff revolved around spitting out scripted lines and "canned routines" at girls, which I tried, briefly, but tossed aside after only a few weeks. It didn't feel genuine at all, and it wasn't how I wanted my interactions with women to be.

They had lots of great advice, to be sure; studying the findings of these guys who'd already been down the path I'd set myself out on was immensely helpful. But in that one department -- in making girls feel special -- I was pretty sure I had something they didn't.

Women do some strange, confusing things.

Things like getting rude and angry with men who are treating them as well as they possibly can. Things like telling a man they're not wearing any underwear... and then walking away when he gets too excited. Things like saying "no" when they mean "yes," and "yes" when they mean "no."

So you'll be forgiven for thinking it must be impossible understanding women.

And to top it all off, most women don't even understand themselves. They can explain some of the simpler things they do, but if you start asking them why they (or other women) do the more complicated things they do, you get answers that are full of holes. They sound good on an pure emotional level, but take a moment to analyze the logic and you'll realize it doesn't hold water.

Women really honestly don't know why they do what they do. So how could you possibly know? But, in fact, learning to understand women actually isn't an impossible task. It's a lot easier than you might think, in fact... so long as you understand a few little things, first.

If you're like me and you come from a background of being low attainability with girls -- teasing them a little too hard, seeming a little too aloof, causing them to clam up and get cold and snippy and dismissive -- or if you started off as a nice guy and ended up swinging to the opposite extreme, you'd probably be inclined to thinking screening and qualifying is the best thing since sliced bread. I know I sure was.

Screening and qualifying is an effective way of finding out if a girl meets your standards. If you're just starting out with women, of course, most of those "standards" are arbitrary standards you're putting up for the sake of seeming like you're being picky; but as you accumulate more success with women, you really do become a lot pickier.

So how do you find out if a girl's your kind of girl? Well, you screen her and, when she passes your screens, you qualify her. At least, that's the standard advice.

What I've realized lately though is that stand-alone screening and qualifying -- even at its acme, its highest levels -- it's still a technique best suited to beginners and early intermediates.

Why? Because, one, screening and qualifying as a stand-alone technique is clumsy. It's unnatural, and it feels contrived. And in fact, as you start getting better, there's something a lot more natural you can use in this approach's place.

I sat there in a café by myself, staring blankly at a couple of abandoned plates of food.

"I won't let this make me bitter," I whispered under my breath.

I'd spent the night talking and moving from club to club with a girl I liked a lot and had been pursuing for months. She was smart, funny, tall -- beautiful. Everywhere she went, she attracted men to her, like moths to a flame. But she treated me different than all the other guys rotating around her; them she'd be polite but dismissive toward; me, she'd spend hours just sitting there talking to. She didn't do that with anyone else. That night, it'd been just us, the entire night -- and she'd been talking about the two of us going to an "after-party" together -- I started thinking that finally, after all this time and effort, I was getting somewhere with her. I suggested we could just chill at my apartment.

And then, in the middle of us eating at a café at the end of the night, before heading to our "after-party," some guy she knew happened to show up, just as she'd gotten up and was heading into the bathroom. She was excited to see him -- then, they disappeared around the corner together. When they came back, they were laughing like little kids... and they sat down next to each other across from me.

I'd been sitting next to her before she got up.

It was early 2006. I didn't know what I was doing -- I'd only been trying to get better with women for a year, and only actively doing it -- religiously -- for about 2 or 3 months now. But I figured I had to try to save this; I'd try anything I could. It couldn't fall apart -- not now. Not when we were so close, after months of hard work.

So I tried boyfriend destroyers, even though this guy wasn't her boyfriend.

I tried seeming as calm and nonplussed as possible as they flirted in front of me.

I tried going over the top and telling them what a beautiful couple they made as they fed each other food across the table from me, hoping she'd protest that they weren't a couple. Instead, she only played along more, telling me she'd been chasing this guy forever but that he kept turning her down.

And then, despite my efforts, the moment I went to the bathroom to collect my thoughts, they disappeared.

The bill was waiting on the table for me when I got back. And they were gone... off into the night together.

"Don't be bitter," I said to myself.

If there's one pet peeve I have right now, it's the current way being an "alpha male" is talked about in most pick up and dating circles. I've gotten to the point personally where I cringe every time I hear some guy talking about "being alpha."

But I don't want to go on an anti-alpha tirade here, because at it's core, the alpha male ideology is very correct; it's just that the term itself has become so laden with cultural baggage that "the alpha male" has just about become a stereotype -- a clownish, cartoon caricature of what an alpha male used to be.

Every time I hear the term "alpha" these days, I imagine some bald, shirtless, gargantuan, vein-popping 'roid-head screaming, "Alpha... ALPHA!!!" at the top of his lungs, and a crowd of skinny nerdy guys standing around him, pointing at him in awe, and whispering to each other, "That's alpha. That's how you get the ladies."

This post is my effort to wrestle back the term "alpha male" from the shadow of itself it's become, and redefine once and for all what the term really means -- and exactly how to be an alpha male... without turning yourself into a cartoon character.

The post "Should You Pay for a Date?" is still, it appears, attracting its fair share of outrage from what seems mostly to be women, who don't like the fact that I'm recommending, based on my own experiences and all of those of every man I'm acquainted with whose tried both ways, that men not pay for their dates if they want better results with girls.

These commentators are protesting, of course, because doesn't fit with the way they think the world ought to work.

But I don't write this blog to talk to people about the way the world ought to work. It'd be great if men could just buy women dinner and women would automatically upon the completion of that romantic date then become the men's lovers, girlfriends, and wives immediately thereafter.

That's not what happens, though. And what this site is about is what does happen -- what works, what doesn't, and everything in between.

So let's settle this, then. I've decided to craft for you, today, the definitive post on how to get girls. After reading this post, your core questions on how to be successful with women are all going be answered -- and any of you ladies reading on here, buckle yourselves in because we're going to take an intensive, in-depth look at the way you choose the men you do.

Think for a moment of a time you were talking to a pretty girl you'd just met. You started hitting it off -- things were going great. You took the conversation deeper and deeper -- getting to know her more and more. It felt like the two of you were bonding at this incredibly close level, and it kept getting closer. There was more and more magic... more and more chemistry... crazy amounts of electricity sparking in the air...

... then, suddenly, the spell was broken. It was like the two of you came up for air, then realized that you'd emerged back up at the surface and couldn't get back down to where you were before.

It was as if you'd awakened from a dream.

Then, try as you might, you couldn't get back into that dream again... and both of you knew it. The interaction with this girl -- this girl you'd been bonding and connecting with so deeply mere minutes before -- ended soon after.

It became too awkward to continue once it'd returned to that surface level of shallow conversation and superficiality, and she uncomfortably excused herself, telling you she had to go find her friends or that it was time for her to head home.

But you were close -- you knew you were. There was so much intensity between the two of you, until it just... evaporated.