Female Mind

Note from Chase: Ross is one of our senior discussion board members, with a very steady hand and plenty of sage advice to go around for men aspiring to excel with women. Ross’s shared a few guest articles on GC before in early 2013, and I’m really happy to announce he's joining the team as one of our new regular contributors. Please welcome him back to writing for the site! Without further ado, I give you Ross.

A situation that has been popping up more frequently on the discussion boards entails a scenario where guys think girls are chasing after them. These guys get frustrated, as they believe that the girl is chasing after them, yet they cannot figure out why things still aren’t working out. They’ll often point to some behavior that’s supposed to be indicative of chasing, yet this doesn’t necessarily provide insight into all of the dynamics at play between the guy and girl here.

The ever-so-popular stand-up gig that pokes fun at women for being illogical in arguments comes to mind when I think of this issue. The husband will argue with his wife using facts, only to be completely shut down by her emotionally charged response. On paper, it will look like he’s won. However, anyone viewing the event could tell you that he obviously lost.

As a result, it’s difficult for someone critiquing a guy’s interactions to tell whether he’s really winning with girls... or only paper-winning. All a forum member can do is read what people have written about their interactions with women, and form opinions and give feedback based off of that. Thus, many guys will receive positive reinforcement that they are doing a good job, even though in real life they just aren’t getting results or reaching their goals.

Today, I hope to relieve some of the issues surrounding this misinterpretation of data. It’s time for a mental model update, because the dynamic of chasing goes much deeper than the surface.

We’ve talked about the friend zone on Girls Chase before: why it’s bad, what it looks like, and how to get out of it.

But you’ve asked for more.

You’ve asked for clear signs you can look for that are undeniable proof you’ve careened off the Road to Sexytimes and into the Bog of Asexuality. Irrefutable sign posts that the good times of dreaming about lovingly gazing into one another’s eyes are long behind you, and you now exist solely to stroke her ego as proof that she is so charming, so wonderful, and so hypnotically mesmerizing that great guys like you will just hang around in awe of her... all while she samples her fill of sexy bad boys.

Well, never fear. While the greatest danger of the friend zone is your own denial, all the rest we will solve with this enlightening post.

So, provided you can handle the healthy dose of cognitive dissonance you’ll receive from discovering that the girl you were so certain you were just one more funny text message away from talking onto your johnston really doesn’t think of you “that way" and probably never will, let’s dive in...

... and arm you with the 14 Terrible Signs You’re Deep in the Friend Zone.

The cocky owner of a small business bends one of his female employees over his desk after hours on a Friday afternoon, when the other employees have gone home, including a pair of male office workers who’ve been competing for that same female coworker of theirs for months.

Across town, an arrogant-but-charismatic high school running back trots off the football field after a loss. Most of the team’s down in the dumps, but he’s not; he’s taking one of the cheerleaders for a “ride around town” tonight. She’ll be the fourth cheerleader he’s slept with from his school’s squad.

That night, a trio of cute girls in flashy, sequined dresses stay past closing time in a semi-popular nightclub there in town for an “after party” that involves them, a bartender, a doorman, and the club owner. All three of the girls are naked in under an hour, and though the routine is getting a little old for each of them, all three of the men still enjoy sleeping with his new girl.

At the same time that evening, a psychologist has a discrete liaison with one of his troubled-but-sensual patients. She knows he’s married and has a family, and the last thing she wants to be is a home wrecker... but she really can’t help herself.

There are a few somethings each of these situations have in common with one another: they are male authority... and female lust.

But the greater irony under all these tales is the one that many average men who haven’t experienced such dalliances themselves spend time boiling with envy over, and vainly try to point out to any woman they can catch the ear of: outside of these environments, with this artificial position power they’ve constructed for themselves or happened into, these men are nobodies... and without that authority those men have, these women probably wouldn’t be very attracted to them.

Yet nevertheless, they are.

Every time you see her, she twirls her hair, smiles at you, and asks you how your day is going. She’s just an absolutely delightful girl, and you know she likes you. You’ve just got to wait for the right moment to make your move.

You’ve known her for ages, and it always feels like you’re building more and more steadily towards something happening. The connection between the two of you is undeniable; you can feel it. It’s visceral and real.

What I’ve noticed more and more as I’ve coached men on dating is that so many of the women that men get caught up on and start chasing after are, in fact, not actually women they really do have some special connection with... but rather, in fact, are simply flirty girls.

They’re women who enjoy flirting with men, teasing men, leading men on, and all because it makes them feel good.

No man will ever admit he’s in love with a flirty girl. His ego always gets in the way; of course a woman isn’t just flirting with me; maybe with some other guy, he thinks, but me? She means it with me.

But the flirty girl is not hard to figure out, nor is she difficult to call on her game-playing. It does, however, take an honest view of the “connection” you have with her... and the stones to tell her to put up or shut up.

Drexel recently wrote a very choice article titled “Creating an Environment for Bondage and Sexperimentation”, and I wanted to continue to expand on this theme and really examine why women actually love BDSM to the extent that they do.

If you’re at all unfamiliar with the term, BDSM is an abbreviation for three distinct sex-related word pairs: bondage and discipline (BD), dominance and submission (DS), and sadism and masochism (SM). Sounds like quite a handful, pretty far outside the ordinary, doesn’t it? But it isn’t so extraordinary as you might think.

Don’t believe that each and every woman in your life hasn’t fantasized about some form of BDSM at least once in her life? Just go ahead and ask all the women you know well. I’m sure you’d be surprised at the result. So let’s look at the motivations and hidden desires that lead to women fantasizing about BDSM.

Back in late 2006 and early 2007, I was on an invitation-only social networking site called Late Night Shots. It was a site that allowed those on the Washington, D.C. social scene to “see and be seen” by others – set up profiles, find out where everyone was gathering at, and the like. Sort of a private Facebook for the D.C. socialite crowd.

One of the more interesting features of LNS then was an anonymous message board where people could ask all sorts of dicey questions and give all manner of unbiased, unfiltered replies, since their answers were in no way tied to their profiles or real world identities.

I wasn’t terribly interested in the gossip section of those boards (”Who’s dating whom in the scene?” “What new girl has rocketed to the top of the scene the fastest?”), although it did make for good occasional reading on how different people evaluated social status competitors in the scene (and worked to build up their and others’ reputations, or tear others down through rumors). What interested me more were the various relationship topics that got posed and debated to death.

One of the most frequent of these was the question of “Do women’s pasts matter?”

While nearly all of the female commenters seemed to argue quite vehemently that they didn’t matter one bit, the male commenters were divided right down the middle in their positions: half that they did, half that they didn’t.

Among the half arguing that they didn’t, there was a further divide: the men who didn’t care about women’s pasts because they had no intention of ever ending up in any form of committed long-term relationship... and the men who didn’t care because they legitimately thought a woman’s past had no bearing on her future.

I’d argue that the past matters even in a fling, hookup, or a casual or open relationship... simply because crazy girls can wreck your life in all kinds of terrible ways even when you’re keeping things arms-length with them, and a one-night stand with the wrong kind of girl can quickly turn down Bad News Lane if she fixates on you or brings other bad stuff into your sphere. But what about commitment? How much a woman’s past matter if you want something serious?

As a student of psychology who worked in the field for years, I have arrived at the belief that the single most important predictor of behavior is context. By this, I mean the immediate environment surrounding the behavior – the people, the atmosphere, and all sensory input streams.

I mean, think about it for a second. Doesn’t it sometimes seem like you have a different personality depending on who you’re with, what you’re doing, or where you are? Have you ever done something, then looked back at it later and thought, “That just wasn’t me! I never do stuff like that!”

It’s almost like there was someone else controlling your actions, because the truth of the matter is that... it was a different personality. It was just as much “you” as the “you” you like to think is “you”, but it was simply expressing a side of itself that you had never experienced before. And, if I had to guess, I’d say you were in some kind of special circumstance when that happened… weren’t you? Maybe you were on vacation, maybe you were intoxicated, maybe you were hanging out with people with whom... for some reason, in that instance, it just seemed like an okay thing to do. Right?

So, as with nearly all phenomena I encounter in my journeys and adventures, I asked myself the question... “How can I use what I’ve learned to improve my sex life and the sex lives of my special lady friends?”