I did much of my early approaching in nightclubs, and took plenty of
phone numbers from them. Yet time and again,
the numbers that panned out were almost all from the minority of
approaches
I did outside the club – in transit, on the street, via social
circle.
Even if I met a girl who liked to party and club
on the street or in
transit, I was still a lot more likely to get a date with her that way
than had I met her in the club.
There were exceptions, of course. I took phone numbers from girls I
met in nightclubs and bars and managed to sleep with them sometimes.
But it was so infrequent it stood out.
Yet eventually, I fixed it. After enough years in the game, I
reached the point where phone numbers from nightclubs are almost as
reliable as phone numbers from girls from other places. How to fix the
club-flake problem is the subject of this
post.
If a girl likes you but withholds sex past a few dates, an
investment-attainability double bind may be the culprit.
Have you ever gone on a first date with a girl and things went
well
with both of you seemingly enjoying each other… then found yourself
struggling to take her home and shag her, and instead of doing so, you
agree to meet once again for yet another date?
Have you then found yourself going on multiple dates with that
woman
– some of them quite intensive and creative – and yet, she still
refuses to go home with you. Or if she does go home with you, she shies
away from having sex? Has this gone on for over five meets?
Today, we’re going to talk about one of the most common
double-bind
situations in courtship, where a girl’s desire to get a guy to commit
to her results in additional investment-seeking – in the form of
deferring sex.
This draws out the courtship and causes her to lose interest
in him, and they never get together or have sex. Instead, both the man and woman
just waste a bunch of time and leave the situation unhappy, not getting
what they wanted.
Despite the pop culture memes, women don’t actually know you
definitely want sex… unless you make it clear to them.
There’s this pervasive belief many men have that women must
automatically know you want to have sex with them if you do. Women on
television claim men are all about
sex, or always have sex on the mind, and roll their eyes at perpetually
horny males. Women you meet in real life get in on the act too;
they may complain to you “guys only want sex.” And men see these
things, and hear these things, and assume women
must actually mean it.
There is an important realization to have about this ‘belief’,
however. That realization is
that it is far from an absolute belief. Any more than even a deeply
woman-skeptical man who says “The only
thing women want is money!” genuinely, truly, at his very core,
believes “the only thing women want is money.” You know, and I know,
and that guy at his core knows that every time he meets a cute girl,
what he thinks is “Geez, I sure hope she
likes me for me.”
Women do the same thing with “Guys only want sex.” It is the same
statement as “Girls only want money.” Neither sex absolutely believes it
(though the more cynical members of either sex may be strongly
opinionated about it). Yet they repeat these statements nevertheless.
We won’t bother to deal with the women-only-want-money belief, since
that isn’t
affecting us here (and we’ve dealt with that and similar
women-only-want-X beliefs in the past). For this meme’s
effects on
women, just look at all the women
who rush to pay for their own meals in the West now; many of the women who rush to pay are women
who fear being labeled with the “This chick only wants money from me”
label. Today though, we’re going to put the men-sex statement
under
the microscope – because of the impacts it has on you, Dear Reader.
How do you know your girlfriend is losing interest and checking
out? There are 7 signs of this, from makeovers to disagreeableness to
new Sex in the City gal pals.
Picture this: you get into a relationship with a girl, and at first
everything is pretty good. Not perfect, but good. Things coast along
for a year or two, consistently pretty good: she’s fun to be with, she
cooks you nice meals, you have nice sex. It’s good.
Then at some point, things start to feel ‘different’. It’s hard to
put your finger on what. But it feels like your girlfriend is losing
interest. Your gut tells you she is checking out... but
when you confront her on it, she tells you not to be ridiculous. It’s
not that she’s checking out, she says; she just wants to [whatever it
is she’s doing]. You grumble a bit and try to ignore your misgivings.
Maybe she’s right and it’s all in your head.
A few months go by and the relationship quality is now
definitely not what it used to be. When you try to talk to her
about it though, she dismisses the thought. More and more, she seems
checked out of the relationship.
Eventually she tells you she wants to “take a break” for a while and
maybe get back together again later. You knew it was coming;
but you couldn’t put your finger on exactly why. And you knew of no way
to stop it.
Today’s article looks at the 7 most common signs a girlfriend is
‘checking out’ of your relationship. These are the signs she isn’t out
yet – but might be on her way there. Forewarned is forearmed; if you
don’t want to be broadsided by a surprise breakup (or a surprise
affair), these signs are your fair warning. Note that these signs serve
equally well for wives as they do for girlfriends; any serious
relationship is subject to the same potential signs.
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.
When you have more than one girlfriend, a few rules are key: she may suspect you see other women, but you must never give her PROOF.
Welcome back to the Harem Series!
In Part 1, I shared the vital importance of Queen Theory, and why every woman you’re dating emotionally must feel like your #1 woman at all times.
I also recently wrote an article where we talked about the core differences between monogamy and non-monogamy: getting bored and losing interest versus dealing with jealousy, respectively. In that article, I discussed how to prevent boredom from seeping into your monogamous relationships. So now we’ll discuss how to prevent jealousy in non-monogamous relationships, and the importance of being discreet.
This article was inspired by something I witnessed one night while in one of the cafes I frequent. I know a few of the regulars who go there. There’s a cute girl, Rebecca, who is sought after by some of the guys, including my friend Rob. Rob has been after Rebecca for over a year, but she’s never paid him any heed, even though they were friends. Eventually Rob moved on, and a few months later started to date a new woman, Elizabeth, whom he brings to the café from time to time after she gets off work. I’ve met Elizabeth, and she’s cute, fun, and cool.
However, this act sparked a new interest in Rob – from Rebecca! After all, preselection is one of the surest signs of an attractive man, and girls are copy cats; they want what other women have. This caused Rebecca to start pestering Rob and his business partner Dave on afternoons while they were both working when Elizabeth wasn’t there yet.
That night, I witnessed Dave take a chance and seduce Rebecca just to see how far he could get. Elizabeth wasn’t there, and Rob was playing a video game on his computer, facing Dave across the table. Rebecca went right along with Dave and did it in her own way; she placed herself on Dave’s lap right in front of Rob while she and Dave were flirting with each other. And I got a second-row seat to the action as well. It got to the point where Dave was massaging her back and putting his fingers in her mouth while she was giving him sultry looks. Rebecca was openly talking with Dave about great sex, and Dave could have taken her out to the back right then and there and shagged her if he wanted.
She was having fun, but she was also doing all this because of her jealousy for Rob and Elizabeth. Rebecca really wanted to make sure he saw how desirable she was to his business partner. Some guys might ask “Why didn’t Rebecca just get with Rob when she had the chance?” Well, it doesn’t always work that way with women. The point of this story is also to show you how jealousy can manifest – and it can cause some extreme behavior.
If she likes you, but opts not to hook up with you, what does it
mean? Why, it means you’ve failed her Chad test – and now she’ll make
you wait.
You’re back alone at your place with a girl. What you know about
her: she’s adventurous, independent, and, by all indications, probably
has been with her fair share of men. Perhaps she’s shared some of her
old war stories with you: guys she’s been with,
wild hookups she has had, sordid escapades gone by.
For some reason, it feels slightly off. You feel like she likes you,
it’s just... her walls are up.
You decide to go for it anyway. She’s near you on the couch, with
her body turned slightly away from yours. Her arms are folded,
her expression slightly tensed. “Come here, you’re so far away,” you
tell her. She scoots a little closer, but she doesn’t seem excited to
do it. You put your hand on her chin to turn her face toward yours. She
stops you.
“I don’t feel ready for that yet,” she says. You feel let
down.
After all that talk about all her crazy past hookups... and now she
“isn’t ready?”
“I should probably go,” she tells you. You figure she’s
blowing you
off. And to be honest, you’re not really feeling it yourself either.
Her defensiveness has killed any interest in her you had earlier. You
walk her to the door. “I had fun,” she says. “We should hang out again
soon.” You grunt a response and let her go.
Two weeks later – you haven’t bothered to message her – she texts
you, asking what you’re up to and why she hasn’t heard from you. It
seems so weird... this girl resisted intimacy when you brought her
back, but she still wants to meet up anyway. Why? For what?
Slowly it starts to dawn on you: she
likes you... just not enough to make you one of the men she gives it up
too fast.
Monogamy and non-monogamy each face their own unique challenges.
Women in monogamous relationships can grow bored; women in
non-monogamous ones, jealous.
There are many different kinds of relationships available to the
romantically gifted man. There’s classical monogamy, of course. There
are friends with benefits relationships
and fuckbuddies. Open long-term relationships (polyamory). There’s one-sided
monogamy. Even pimp-ho and master-slave relationships, if you really
want to explore the dark side (which we won’t do here).
All these, more or less, fall into one of two categories: open (in which the partners may see
other people) and exclusive
(in which the partners don’t – or at least aren’t supposed to – see
other people. Sometimes people are naughty though). Today’s article
explores the two primary challenges each style of relationship faces:
the biggest challenges to the health of exclusive and non-exclusive
romantic relationships.
I recently kicked off a series (the “How to Build a Harem”
series) to convey what I’ve learned about non-monogamous
relationships and steer guys who are interested in such relationships
in the right direction. I realized that before I can delve into
non-monogamy, I need to showcase it as a comparison to the conventional
model we all know about. I want to highlight the distinctions between
challenges in both systems (if you’re in either one, you might see
these in action in just a matter of months, but really they are
inevitable).
No system is better than another.
There are advantages and disadvantages to all flavors of relationship,
but the challenges differ vastly by system. I’ll lay these out
to help you figure out which system is right for you while also
creating the best
outcome for yourself long term.
What women say they want and what they actually choose often
doesn’t line up. Why is so much of what women really want unconscious?
One of the most challenging aspects of psychological science is how
often people say they want one thing, only to choose something else.
I saw this routinely back in my tire salesman days. A customer would
come in and say he wanted the cheapest set of tires we had. I’d ask him
about what he wanted his driving experience to be like; I’d discover he
wanted great road traction and a comfortable ride; and he’d proceed to
purchase a premium set of tires with excellent traction and ride
comfort instead.
This “what you say you want vs. what you actually want” issue
manifests in all sorts of ways in psychological science, too. Paul
Eastwick and Eli Finkel’s 2008 speed dating study “Do people know
what they initially desire in a romantic partner?” found no matter
how strong someone insisted a preference was (e.g., “I will only date a
girl if she is beautiful” “I
won’t date a guy unless he makes a lot of money”), that person was no
more likely to pick someone who matched the preference in a live event
than average.
In his chapter in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology
and the Generation of Culture, on how women evaluate mate
prospects, Bruce J. Ellis unfurls a host of items on how women select
their mates. One of the most important things Ellis talks about,
though, is some of the paradoxes in mate selection. For instance, much
research finds women are drawn to men who are socially dominant:
men who dominate their social environments. These men tend to be
cooler, more aloof, and more detached. Yet a lot of other research
finds women are drawn to men who are warm, personal, and caring. How do
those two connect?
We’ll talk about Ellis’s solutions to the warmth-dominance paradox
below. But first we need to pose a question: do people actually know
what they want?
