Pickup

What's the best way to pick up girls? You might be surprised by what can influence a woman's receptiveness... even something like being on birth control or not.

A fascinating study, "Relationship satisfaction and outcome in women who meet their partner while using oral contraception," was several days ago published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Researchers from the UK decided to look at the differences in women who began dating men while on birth control, and those who started dating men when they weren't on birth control.

What they found was this:

“Women who used OC scored lower on measures of sexual satisfaction and partner attraction, experienced increasing sexual dissatisfaction during the relationship, and were more likely to be the one to initiate an eventual separation if it occurred. However, the same women were more satisfied with their partner's paternal provision, and thus had longer relationships and were less likely to separate.”

In other words, using birth control (or oral contraception -- "OC") leads to women ending up with men they're less attracted to, are sexually dissatisfied with, increasingly become more sexually dissatisfied with as the relationship progresses, and the women more often are the ones to call the relationship off eventually. On the plus side, the men women on birth control end up with usually make better husbands and fathers, and their relationships lasted an average of two years longer.

The flip side of this is that women off birth control choose to mate and date with sexy men -- men they find more attractive, who give them better sex, and who they're less likely to initiate a breakup with -- but the breakups still happened, on average two years earlier than the men women met while on contraception. And it's more often the men doing the breaking up -- likely because these are more attractive men with more options with women who don't like staying tied down too long.

The reason for these huge differences in dating preferences -- why women on the pill are ending up with nice guys they're unsatisfied with but who make good dads, and why women off the pill end up with sexy guys they're excited by but who break up with them -- comes down to what the pill does chemically to women's brains -- and that works out to be some interesting stuff. Read on if you dare...

A man finds himself in conversation with a beautiful woman. Excited, and a little bit nervous, he starts to talk. And he talks more. And more. She can hardly get a word in edgewise.

He feels -- no, he knows -- that if he lets the conversation die down, just for a second, she's apt to get up and leave. So, instead, he decides he must run this conversation like a man possessed... he's got to keep it going himself. He's just got to.

And for a while he does.

Sooner or later though, eventually, he hits a moment where he finishes what he was saying and doesn't know what to say next. There's a pause; it's an awkward pause.

"Well," says the girl, "it was great talking to you. But I have to go find my friends now."

"Uh - okay," says the man. "Nice meeting you."

He never sees her again.

"Drat," he thinks to himself, immediately after she leaves, "if only I'd been able to keep the conversation running a little longer, until we were able to find something that was interesting to her. Then it all would've been okay."

I know this feeling -- I used to experience it myself all the time -- and I'd guess most guys reading this have probably felt it too. What it comes from, though, is a fundamental misconception about how a conversation with a new woman ought to run, and what that conversation is really all about -- and it also shows an inattention to using a very powerful conversational tool for getting things working in your favor: the pregnant pause.

As a boy, I decided I wanted to learn how to be a man who inspired others to gather around him. I wanted to become a magnet for people. I don't know why I wanted this; it's just something I've always had, something deep in my DNA. I have family members who are actors, singers, and entrepreneurs; at least one of my ancestors was a privateer (or, more commonly, a pirate), a few hundred years back.

Even as recently as my great-grandfather, I'm told that my grandmother was first introduced to her future father-in-law when my grandfather brought her to his father's estate in Europe, led her up a large grand staircase, and cast open the doors to his bedroom, revealing an old man reposed in his bed with two young women, one on either arm. I come from a long line of different, eccentric individuals who have had little taste for playing by the rules.

Yet, I still faced an uphill climb as I developed. It might seem that being a man is passé in today's world of tender, sensitive males and assertive, upwardly mobile females. TV and the movies lionize the shy, unconfident man; powerful men routinely get painted the villains, or used as unintelligent plot devices eventually triumphed over by strong women and underdog men. Society tells you it's men's feelings that are most important, and achievement is of secondary importance; so long as you're happy, that's all that really matters.

Because of all this, we now celebrate the ordinary, and frown upon the exceptional. It's as though the exceptional threaten ordinary individuals' contentedness in their own ordinariness, and so must be discouraged from pursuing the exceptionalism that would seem so disruptive to those around them.

Well, if you want to know how to be a man women chase and pursue, you're going to have to accept that you're going to get a lot of push back from people, and you're going to have to confront the beliefs you've been instilled with since a child. You'll have to pull the wool from your eyes, so to speak.

But as you do, you'll find the world comes to look a more and more beautiful place, the more you see it for what it really is. Today, I want to help you pull that wool down and see the world a bit more for what it is, and arm you with a few steps to start taking right now to set yourself on the road to becoming the kind of man you've always dreamed you could be.

And in order to accomplish all this, I'm going to give you a set of maxims to grow by.

I'm sitting at Washington-Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, listening to the ticket lady bark orders at a crowd of passengers trying to board a plane to Denver.

"Seating Areas 1 and 2 only!" she shouts. "If you're Seating Area 3 or 4, feel free to have a seat and make yourself comfortable, there's no need to stand. If you're Seating Area 3 or 4 and traveling with someone else you may board, but if not please wait for me to call your Seating Area. Boarding Seating Areas 1 and 2! Areas 1 and 2 only!!"

It strikes me that this woman is a stickler for the rules. And, that her admonition is probably entirely directed at those who prefer to break the rules -- the ones who can't stand the rules.

And that made me think about how different people deal with rules differently.

Some people need rules, and define themselves by them. If you take away the rules, they become scared and confused. If they see or hear about people breaking the rules, they become angry and upset and work to get those people back in line. If you give them new rules to follow and explain why those rules are necessary, they're the fastest to adapt and learn to work within them and uphold them.

Other people can't tolerate rules at all, and try to break them whenever possible. These are the crazy, dynamic people who never are still, and this personality type probably defines the founders of a majority of businesses and governments and new branches of art and science out there -- and they're also the ones you see ending up in shouting matches trying to get their ways, or ending up in prison for going too far.

And then you've got people in the middle -- I'm one of those. I don't like the rules, and I'm happiest when the rules disappear, but I'm fine operating within them if I need to so long as I know I'm working toward a place where I can be free and do what I want to do. People like me also tend to be good at using one rule to break another, thereby getting our way but making it difficult for the rule makers who comprise the majority of society to argue with us, because hey, there was a conflict in the rules -- we just chose one of them instead of the other.

It's my belief that whether you play by the rules or not is a big determinant of the trajectory you take learning to get better with women, what's easy for you, what's hard, and where you eventually even want to get to.

So let's talk some about the rule makers and the rule breakers.

A reader writes in asking about attainability:

“Hey Chase, Great blog man, top notch stuff. Never been part of the PUA community, but been doing self improvement (corresponding with my values) for 4 years or so, and your blog and TSM are pretty much the only two I read consistently. I've also read your book, and have a question on attainability. So here's the issue:

Not to sound pretentious or arrogant, but I'm a pretty good looking guy, fantastic shape, fashionable, carry myself well, great job blah blah blah, and I have a lot of symptoms of having much too low of attainability. Only super confident women seem to have the guts to put themselves out there (which can be a good thing, they are my type), make eye contact passing by each other, or even manage a smile after eye contact is made.

Now I am a very pleasant, outgoing person, and I always walk around with at least a pleased look on my face, so it's not like I'm walking around frowning or anything. I guess my question is, how can I raise my attainability through body language or the way I carry myself before words are spoken or even eye contact is made, so that more women are open to me? This isn't in my head, I live in a smaller town (50,000) people, half are college kids (I'm in my late 20's) and countless times friends tell me women ask about me all interested, and I'll end up knowing who they're talking about but have never had these girls so much as make eye contact or smile?! I don't want to walk around smiling like a goofball to make myself seem friendlier, help me man!”

This goes deeper, to the issue of how to make yourself more relatable to people. In this reader's case, he's running into the same problem I used to have a lot -- that only the most confident women feel comfortable around him, and everybody else can't relate. I struggled with that for quite a while myself.

These days though, I'm a pretty darn relatable guy.

And you might be surprised by that, considering my lifestyle should make me all but unrelatable -- frequent international travel (often to places like Cambodia or Monaco instead of the "usual" places like Australia or England), starting up not just one business, but a whole host of them, meeting girls in bars, clubs, airports, and train stations, and a hard-line approach toward friendships and relationships that most people would probably politely describe as "extreme."

Me, relatable? I don't even find the same things enjoyable that most other people do.

Yet, should you ever meet me, chances are we'll get along just fine. We'll laugh; we'll trade stories; and, like so many people I meet, you'll quite possibly end up telling me you feel like we've been friends forever, despite the fact that we'll have met minutes before.

That's because I sat down and put the time into figuring out how to be relatable, both in conversation and even on first appearance. And the great news is, anybody can pull it off -- all it takes is a little effort, and a bit of a push in the right direction to get you started.

Something that can be a great deal of fun to deploy when talking with some new girl is playful banter. You can quickly find yourself in a riveting, electrifying back and forth that leaves both you and her smiling and excited with this fresh new person you've each just met.

However, if you haven't spent as much developing your technique, playful banter can, instead of being a lot of fun, end up being downright headache-inducing. Pop the aspirin and break out the Alka-Seltzer -- you'll need it (or maybe she will).

And even if you have put time into building good wit, there's a good chance -- particularly if you're newer or even intermediate -- that you haven't learned the timing of using that wit and banter in a conversation with a new woman yet -- and that you may very well go over the top, or go for too long, straying into the land of the socially awkward or even calling up out-and-out auto-rejection via over-gaming, thereby costing yourself a girl who otherwise might've been yours.

For that reason, figuring out the rules of bantering properly ends up being quite important for your early game -- you're not always going to deploy your wit in full force with every young woman you meet, but you will with enough of them that having it honed more or less to a razor's edge can end up making the difference between making it to the mid-game with that new pretty girl you like, or having to bow out early.

Thus, this quick and dirty guide on getting down some of the basics of bantering playfully with women.

You're out and about, in a high end nightclub or a top shelf retail outlet, when you spot an insanely beautiful woman. She's just gorgeous: dressed to the nines, hair flowing and perfect, and standing atop 6 inch heels. You have to meet her.

So, you walk over, start talking to her, and, to bring her back down to Earth and rob her of the inflated status her beauty and style must, you reason, confer, you apply a well-worn tactic from the early days of the codifying of seduction: the PUA neg.

"Nice nails," you ask her, 30 seconds into the conversation. "Are they real?"

That's a neg, and that's how it looks in practice for 99.9% of the guys out there who're using it.

What I want to address with today's post is what the concept behind the neg is, whether negs actually work, and whether there are any alternatives to it.

I'll lead off by telling you this: the neg, at least the way most guys who use it these days use it, is totally not the right way to go.