Seduction

Why is it that most men can't seem to get what they want with women? How come so many men can't get a girl?

A few months back, a friend of mine asked me to author a post on leading women. I put it off for a while, because it's not as sexy a topic as, say, opening or locking in or overcoming objections or dating. Leading's just... a little vague, as far as topics go.

Yes, it's good to be an alpha male, and it's good to have a set process you follow, and to move on fast if a girl isn't following along. But how's that all come into play in a cohesive strategy for getting success with women?

If you'd like to achieve anything resembling consistent, reliable success with women, you're quickly going to realize that leaving things purely up to chance isn't going to cut it. "God helps those who help themselves," goes the saying -- which, boiled down, quite basically means that good things come to the people who go out and actively bring good things into their lives.

In other words, success comes to those who engineer that success.

But still, most folks don't bother engineering anything approximating success. Most average folks sit around waiting for success to find them. And it never does.

For success with women to start occuring for a guy, that has to change for him. So what's it take to advance an average man who can't get a girl into a man who consistently can?

Well, among other things, it takes this: he's got to be leading women.

A guy meets a girl he likes. He starts talking to her, and there's electricity in the air. Attraction. He can tell she likes him. A lot, even.

She tells him all kinds of things about herself, her eyes wide and filled with excitement. It feels as though there's a bubble around them, in which only they exist; the outside world falls away.

For a while, as time passes, the energy and enthusiasm only builds. It builds and builds, until it hits a peak; a crescendo. And then... it begins to fade.

The guy panics mentally; he can tell he's losing this girl, whom he felt so sure was his only minutes before. He works hard, trying to turn things around, to reignite the passion that was there. But alas, his efforts fail, and the fire dies.

He's fallen victim to a painful fact of life and love: attraction has an expiration date.

But what's more painful is, guys almost never realize this is why they failed. Usually they assume it was a value problem, or that they need to get better at maintaining attraction.

If only they knew the truth: they did just fine with attraction. It was, ultimately, that failure to act in a timely enough manner that led them to losing the girl.

Question from a reader named Sam yesterday:

Hi Chase,

Just wanted to say thanks for all the great advice and content you post here. Some of this stuff is pure gold because I have had a few "ah ha" moments, especially about the interchangeability of value and good feelings, and this I think will take my game to a better level. More importantly though, it has greatly increased my understanding of relationships, not because you didn't know this, but you "just couldn't put it into words".

Another thing I learned here was that I was making the mistake of investment, but from what I have read here, there are a few things to fix here and there on this part. Can you please write up a comprehensive post on investment? (haven't come across one here yet) And some of the dos and don'ts of it. You did mention in one of your posts (chase framing post) your would write about "comprehensive investment / compliance post".

You probably hear a lot of praise, but I'm just putting it out there that this is indeed great stuff. I honestly do wish I had come across your site earlier. All in all, you now have a regular reader.

Investment's a great topic. It's one of those things that boggled the heck out of me early on, but it pays such incredible dividends in the end. Once you really get down a strong, solid gameplan for investment and you know what you're doing with it and you have your strategy for approaching investment in whatever situation, your interactions with women run so much more smoothly.

Of course... getting there, well, that's the challenging part.

I was just playing a computer game, this combination zombie / Sim City style game called Rebuild, where you try to expand your city while at the same time keep your defenses up to guard against sporadic zombie attacks that you can't predict and don't know when will strike. I am pretty swamped with work at the moment, and don't allow myself much leisure time aside from socializing or seeing friends or spending time with girls... playing that game an hour or two a day is one of the few things I do to unwind these days.

Anyway, at one point in the game I was faced with a decision: I'd taken some heavy losses, and I had a chance to make a critical expansion, but to take that chance, I was going to have to leave myself vulnerable to attack. I might be attacked and lose the game if I took that chance, or I might not be attacked and I'd make a much-needed step forward. At first I thought, "No, it's too dangerous – maybe I should just play it safe and progress slowly." But then I realized, at the rate I was going, with the losses I'd already suffered, playing it safe probably wasn't going to pan out in the end. It was either play to win, and maybe win, or maybe lose on the spot, or play it safe, and probably die a slow death instead.

A good, if somewhat disreputable, buddy of mine in Southern California who'd bedded a significant number of women he'd met primarily at dive bars once summed up his philosophy of getting girls to me like this: "Just get 'em drunk, bring 'em home, get 'em more drunk, and have sex!" Ah, the age-old combination of sex and alcohol.

People've been doing it that way since the Ancient Greeks were sporting togas and spears. Sex and alcohol have gone hand-in-hand in human society for a long, long time. Stands to good reason there ought to be some good reasons for it, then, too.

Everyone knows why the two make such good bedfellows: alcohol lowers inhibitions, and sex is something we tend to have a lot more when our inhibitions are in said lowered condition. Alcohol also serves as a social lubricant – liquid courage, if you will – making men more bold and women more willing. But it goes deeper than that – and if you truly want to master the seductive arts, you're going to need to be willing to loosen your grip on the bottle, too.

In the seductions of every man, there comes a time when his woman begins to object. “What are you doing?” she’ll say. “I don’t think we should be doing this.” “We can’t do this, it’s too soon.” “We can’t do this, we’re friends.”

Most of the time, this stops men cold, freezing them in their tracks with no recourse and no idea what to say or do. “Crap,” the guy thinks. “She’s protesting. What do I do now??” So, rather than take uncertain action with uncertain effects, he does nothing, and nothing happens, and the girl leaves. The seduction is forfeit, and he has lost his girl.

But objections don’t have to mark the end of a seduction. In fact, you can actually use objections to make a girl want you more, and make her more certain that you’re the man for her. And it all ties back to some psychological basics to understand why.

Something I noticed when I made the shift from being cool and friendly to being cool and sexy and edgy was that all of a sudden, women wanted to go to bed with me fast, and they were a lot less pushy about relationships. At the time, I just thought, “Well, of course, women want to have sex with a sexy man.” Well, I just read some research that fleshes this out quite a bit more.

In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 100(2), February 2011, Terri Conley of the University of Michigan’s Department of Psychology goes back and reopens research into casual sex propositions, and her findings with this new research are quite revelatory, at least when it comes to breaking down old paradigms in the “men want casual sex, women don’t” view of the world.