Pickup

Women are subtle in how they show interest. Well, by male standards, anyway. Even when women think they are blatantly obvious, they’re quite often being very subtle by male standards.

Learning to tell how girls show interest is a very valuable skill for a man, because it will allow him to operate with greater assurance he’s making the right move at the right time, and will also allow him to pick up the pace when a woman signals she is ready.

The last couple of girls I slept with surprised me a little at how quickly they were ready to get together. They gave me some hints that probably would’ve seemed fairly subtle; a friend of mine remarked that one of the girls I took home and bedded rather quickly quite recently hadn’t even seemed to be terribly interested in me, and that it just looked like we were having a good conversation. Being able to read the signals they gave me was the main reason I moved as quickly with them as I did.

Probably by now you have your New Year’s resolutions all done up and set to go for 2011, and you’re charged up and (hopefully) already setting to work turning those resolutions into reality.

I’ve always been a little anti-New Year’s resolutions myself, but that mostly because I’m just kind of a humbug, contrarian kind of cat. When I stop and think about it, I often do set a number of goals at the very beginning of the year, which for all intents in purposes are, in fact, resolutions for the new year. So, I grudgingly accept that now I, despite my protestations otherwise, do in fact make New Year’s resolutions. And they do, in fact, help.

So if you’re a little on the lazy side, or a bit of a humbug like me, and you don’t usually do resolutions for the next year, I invite you to do things a little different this year and join me in setting a few goals for yourself in 2011.

There’s this thing called approach anxiety, and I haven’t talked about it all that much, because it was never a huge concern for me personally, and it was always something I was able to push through okay on my own. Sure, sometimes I’d stiffen up and miss out on a girl I should’ve had, but all in all it was never too bad for me. I had a lot of fears as a kid, and got into the habit early of overcoming them by confronting them head on; this might be why I was never overly concerned with this one. I just tackled it the same as the rest of them.

But for some guys, approach anxiety is crippling. I’ve coached men who would at times simply refuse to approach women; I eventually got pretty good at getting guys to approach, even when they were terrified to (the first few approaches are always the toughest), but how does a guy who’s shaken about going up to meet women do that on his own, without a coach there to work him through it?

The chief tenet of the Law of Least Effort in seduction is that the less effort you put in while still achieving the desired result, the more powerful, attractive, and sexy you appear. One of the most powerful ways of doing this is by learning to communicate without the use of words.

If you’ve ever studied very charismatic people – I have, and I recommend it – something you’ll notice is that they frequently say things with fun, charming, wordless expressions. A smile and a wink, say, or a mischievous look. For instance, maybe someone asks a charismatic man if he can handle a certain situation – he gives them the skeptical look with just a hint of a knowing smile and then gets to it. Or maybe he gives a small smile, makes a thumbs up sign, and goes about his business.

I was sitting in a nightclub tonight, smoke and booze surrounding me, sipping on a Jack and Coke (or what passes for one in this country), and thinking about some past interactions and feeling vaguely annoyed. There was the girl on Saturday whose friend was pushing her to go home with me as hard as she could, but the girl was a little too shy and wanted to push that back. I didn’t push as hard as I could; I still have a decent chance with her – she’s set to come cook dinner for me later this week – but my chances would’ve been better had I pushed a bit harder and taken her home that night. She liked me enough, but rather than close it out when I had it I let it slip through my fingers. Then there was the girl I brought home Friday night but who stayed tense and I didn’t push anything with since I couldn’t get her comfortable. She wants to see me again too, but my chances in the future are far lower than they were that night she was sitting in my apartment.

This is one of those things that’s as effective in opening as it is in closing, and it’s useful throughout the course of an interaction. Pulling on a woman’s arm or shoulders or waist (or, if you’re in bed or on the sofa, her legs or feet) and dragging her into you is one of those very fun, very dominant, very sexual things a man can do to a woman (or a woman can do to a man!) that take things and spike the level of excitement and intrigue very quickly.

The reasons it works so well are basically that:

• Only really confident men do this
• Only really dominant, sexual men do this
• It shakes a woman out of autopilot and brings her back into there here-and-now

Autopilot I just realized I haven’t written about on here yet; so let’s slate that as something to target in the near future. But for now, suffice it to say you don’t want women floating through their interactions with you without putting any mental footwork in. You want them making effort – albeit easy, natural effort – to be with you.

Here’s one I absolutely love. Not much to write on in this article, because we’re just talking about a facial expression here, so it’ll be a short one. The expression we’re discussing here is the one called “The Skeptical Look.”

You ought to learn this look and make it a core part of your repertoire of expressions if it isn’t something you regularly use. Check the picture attached to this article for an example of what I’m talking about here – look at how the guy is looking at the girl. The skeptical look is extraordinarily useful, and it’s a look you’ll be using in a variety of scenarios. As we touched on in yesterday’s entry, “How to Get Wild Party Girls,” you want to be using as much nonverbal communication as possible in your interactions. This is one of the ways you’ll be doing that.

If you have any friends who are naturally good with women – with meeting women in bars, or nightclubs, or parties, or cafés, or the street, or wherever they meet them – guys who are successful with women, who meet women and take them home fast and get intimate with them – you’ve probably seen the skeptical look. It’s just an expression that strong, sexy men tend to use. You using it communicates to women that you’re among that elite group of highly desirable men yourself.