Social Commentary

Some feel genuinely unfulfilled by reserving their love for just one partner. Is polyamory better understood as a sexual orientation rather than a lifestyle?

As the title says, I recently had a date with two women at the same time. Now, I know what you might be thinking: “Did he forget that he already had a date that night? Did he accidentally double-book? Did he screw up? Was there a fight? Were there tears?”

Well, the answer to all those questions is a resounding “no”.

This was my first ever “triad date” with two partners that I’m regularly seeing. We all agreed to it and planned it out carefully. For about a year now, I’ve been (fairly successfully, I think) following a polyamorous lifestyle, and I’d like to tell you all about it because I feel like some of the readers here might be interested in expanding their horizons and exploring this lifestyle.

Those of you following Adam Lyons might already know about polyamory, but for those of you not in-the-know, allow me to explain.

Busy, waiting, or boxed in? If done right, being on your smartphone can be a powerful tool to intrigue and attract women.

A common target of social criticism these days is our obsession with phones. You’ve seen those trite, hipster videos about how all we do is stare at our screens, how we live in a fast-paced, consumerist society, which has caused us to lose touch with in-person communication, leading to our lacking social skills.

I don’t buy it. For a while, I did. It makes sense. We do live in a disposable society that throws things away when they’re no longer needed. Chase elegantly pointed that out in his article on how some guys feel like disposable dicks-on-sticks.

However, he also pointed out how this disposability goes both ways, affecting women, too.

There’s always a flip-side.

This is my favorite video I’ve put out. It’s so beautifully empowering and inspirational if you can make it through. The journey of seduction and learning about women is, at its core, a journey of understanding what you can and cannot get from women. When you learn that romantic love, the everlasting kind that is perpetuated by not only our media and culture, but by our intrinsic desire to find lasting pleasure and lasting peace, is not real, your world will change.

Some might argue that romantic love is a new idea, and in some ways this is correct; most cultures up until a few hundred years ago saw sex and marriage as a transaction that kept resources flowing and bloodlines intact, but the game we play in public is very different from the game we play in our hearts and in our heads.
 
We have ALWAYS sought true love.

We are driven to find permanence, and the biggest trick we ever played on ourselves was convincing ourselves that we could find it in a romantic partner.

Not only is this a lie, it will SEVERELY hinder your romantic capabilities, both in casual and long-term relationships. You will be perpetually disappointed that a seduction or a relationship did not remain filled with bubbles and joy.

Watch the video and find out why true love is an illusion and why you should let it go.

Have social media and dating apps made modern dating disposable? Not quite – the problem goes back farther than them, to mid-20th Century “throw-away culture.”

Two months back, a reader asked the following question:

“Hey Chase could you possible do an article discussing whether men are disposable due to online services like Tinder & Co.? I mean when a man doesn’t put out a good performance on date, a woman can just say “next!” and go on Tinder for more endless matches. I currently feel that way and I thought another perspective man bring some fresh air.”

It’s a pertinent question... although not as new of one as apps like Tinder might suggest.

American society (dating apps like Tinder originate from America too) has been accused as far back as 1955 as being a ‘throwaway society’. We have articles on the American habit of throwing away too much; articles that accuse corporations of being at least partly to blame, building things not to last or to become obsolete so consumers pay to upgrade to more recent versions. Other discussions focus on the abundance of material goods in our society, which by extension causes us to devalue those same goods.

This isn’t limited only to the economy and material wealth, either.

There are articles all over the Internet about disposable dating culture. Here’s an article that talks about disposable dating in New York and San Francisco. Here’s a blog post from a woman who talks about ‘recycling’ all the men she’s dated back into the dating pool. Here’s a more general one that discusses how to know if you’ve been in a ‘disposable relationship’.

You could make an argument that some portion of Girls Chase philosophy treats dating relationships like disposable goods. The recommendation to replace rather than chase assumes romantic partners are substitutable goods, and you can ditch one and get another one. The basis behind the advice in articles like “Can’t Stop Thinking About Her” and “Just Friends: A Man’s Worst Nightmare” is this too. I strongly recommend these articles and the perspectives in them, of course; they are necessary tools for navigating the romantic terrain in any developed, urbanized society. However, they reflect upon the nature of dating in a society like that as well as they teach how to navigate it.

Dating apps (like Tinder, Bumble, and Bagel Meets Coffee) ultimately are just the latest iteration of this modern American approach to personal relationships.

But is our approach these days truly disposable? Is it so only with men, or with women too? And if dating has become disposable, how much of online dating and social media is the culprit?

Everybody likes attention. Yet with women, attention is more than a means to an end – getting your attention is very often the end itself.

Women will tell you they want a lot of things.

But there’s one thing women want from you above and beyond all else: your attention.

They can want this attention to take various forms.

Some women want you to be smitten with them.

Some women want you to chase after them.

Some women want you to feel like you could never have them (yet pine after them regardless).

Some women want you to court them, seduce them, and make love to them.

Some women just want you to think they’re amazing.

But the one thing all women have in common is they want you to notice them, look at them, and pay them attention.

As a man, this is important for you to understand. All the women around you fight for your attention. They do it in different ways. Some tempt you; some shame you; some scold you; some befriend you; some agree with you. All seek to have you notice them, listen to them, and invest your time and energy into them.

You must understand you can control which women receive your attention... and what they must give you in exchange for it.

But just because you can control this, doesn’t mean you will. Many women are far better at extracting attention from men without giving things men value in return for it than men are at getting what they want in return.

Everyone out there is trying to influence you. How susceptible are you to that influence – and how susceptible are those around you?

I wanted to write a quick post (that turned out not to be so quick) on resistance and susceptibility to influence. This article is something of a cousin piece to my piece on grouping and herding in dating from last week.

The subject of this article - resistance and susceptibility to influence- goes for you and the people around you. Your friends, your family, your workmates, your lovers, partners, and dates.

Everyone is susceptible to the influence of other people and forces. The degree of susceptibility varies from person to person, and situation to situation. Some people are more easily influenced than others. Some situations make it easier to influence people than others. Most people are only marginally aware (at best) of their influencability.

If you are susceptible to influence but do not realize it, other people can step into your mind and make you think things and believe things you might not really want to think or believe. This can lead you to taking actions you might previously not have agreed with. Sometimes this turns out to be beneficial; sometimes not really.

For an example of the beneficial sort, I had a friend in university who influenced me to apply for an internship with Nike and pick up a minor in supply chain. Until this friend, I did not care about getting a job after school, was doing the minimum necessary to get through school, and disdained the idea of internships. Yet because of this friend, who'd had an impressive co-op run building a new supply chain process at Tyco, I grew excited about getting a good job and doing better in school. I didn't get the internship, but came in second in a pool of 200 candidates and got some very valuable feedback from the interviewer which played a key role in me getting the job I did get, a year later. I got more a lot more focused on school and got straight As again the next semester, for the first time in years. And I got my dream job on the first try - I zeroed in on them and the job fair and blew their socks off in my interview. Had that friend not influenced me, none of that would've happened.

Years later, I was in a startup where one of my business partners influenced me to open up the purse strings more than I thought was wise, against my instincts and all the reading I'd done on startups spending all their money too quick being one of the #1 reasons they go under. He influenced me to do a number of other things more in-tune with how he thought we should do things and less in tune with how I thought we should. We ran out of money and I had to close the business and lay everyone off. The partner who'd influenced me to spend more managed to negotiate the rights to the business away from myself and the other partner (despite having joined the startup much later, and having taken far more capital out of it than he'd put into it), then sold those rights to another group of founders. The business is now a successful venture-backed business doing everything I originally wanted to do, and would've had it do... had we not run out of funds so quick.

I don't regret the experience (I enjoy Girls Chase much more as a business; and I received a lifetime of invaluable lessons in negotiation, predatory partnerships, and sticking to your guns - plus a healthy dose of business confidence after I found I'd been right all along), but the outcome was a direct result of that business partner influencing me to act in ways contrary to how I'd have acted on my own.

Every human being is susceptible to the influence of other human beings. There are no exceptions to this. Locate the strongest, most resolute human being in the world, and I guarantee you we can find a way to make him crack with enough time, and the right people, in the right situation.

The question we want to look at today though is how susceptible vs. resistant are you and those around you?

Despite our language and identities, people move in herds. You have three (3) tools to get the girl you want from her tribe: integration, separation, and absorption.

We think of ourselves as individuals. Separate, unique, we act entirely of our own volition.

Yet man is a herd animal. Cram him into a wall-to-wall, shoulder-to-shoulder crowded concert or train station, then spook the herd, and you kick off a stampede. People may die, crush others, or trample, as throngs of panicked individuals, each catching the sense of panic from the next, surge over and against each other for the exits. In the aftermath of some deadly stampedes, investigators can find no emergency and cannot even figure out what caused the panic.

Show a man a market craze that everyone is getting in on and watch him lose his mind. In China, peer-to-peer lending has exploded as the economy has declined, even though defaults on these loans are sky high and the prospect of getting a return is dim. A few months earlier in the West, a Bitcoin craze thundered across the market. It was unrelated to any improvement in the usability or acceptance of Bitcoin as a currency – in fact, over the past several years, Bitcoin has only grown worse as a currency. 100% of Bitcoin’s increased valuation was due to market speculators buying up Bitcoin to cash in on the craze. Yet during Bitcoin fever, everyone was an optimist, telling friends, family members, and coworkers to “buy, buy, buy!” Today, five months after the crush began, the price of Bitcoin has come very close to where it was before the stampede ever began; in the process, thousands of people made fortunes, and thousands of others lost them (I personally know a few folks on both sides). Every bit of those gains and losses came at the expense or benefit of someone else gambling the other way.

(side note: fun dub of a Russian music video a friend of mine who was heavily invested in Bitcoin shared with me during the peak of the Bitcoin craze):

These, of course, are extreme scenarios.

And much of the time, even for people aware of human herd mentality, the concept gets peacefully tucked away into a kind of “only in extremes” awareness. Only in extreme situations, we tell ourselves, do humans behave in mindless, herd-like ways. The rest of the time, we are those unique, separate, totally consciously in-control individuals we tell ourselves we truly are.

However, this isn’t how it works at all. Man, as a social animal, is every bit as groupish as ants, horses, biofilms, and wildebeest. More to the point for our purposes, if you want to peel a woman out of her group, or get her to do what you wish in public, an understanding of how grouping and herding works in the people you’d like to influence is key.