Female Mind

Eye contact is one of those things that's a great deal of fun when you know what you're doing, but a real thorn in your side when you're still working on figuring it out. It's subcommunication at the very core level – talking in the absence of words. At once both more powerful than verbal conversation, and, until you've come to a better understanding of it, often distractingly unclear.

Eye contact flirting, in particular, can be a real head scratcher until you're pretty well versed in reading the various signals women are giving, and have figured out what signals you ought to be giving back. The eyes are used to communicate a wide range of feelings and messages, and what might seem trivial to an untrained guy may well be a crucial signal a more experienced man will jump all over.

My aim here was to write a very solid post that's going to cover all the bases with eye contact and get down to some real practical, point-by-point details so you'll be able to know with confidence exactly how to use your eyes with even the most beautiful, socially elite of women out there. The goal is to take the nuanced, difficult-to-pin down bits and pieces of eye contact flirting I've picked up over the years and get them down here so you can start applying them with the girls you meet today.

I was looking at my pal Mark's blog over on Practical Pick Up, and read through a blog post he has up on something he calls "Chronic Texter Syndrome," referring to American girls who are on their cell phones texting all the time, even throughout the course of a seduction.

I put a post up on phone calls and text messaging on dates in early February discussing exactly this phenomenon, and on Mark's blog I noted in a comment that this is by no means restricted to women in America. It happens in China too, and I've seen it in other countries I've visited over the past year. I dare say at this point that it's a worldwide phenomenon.

The other thing I noted in my comment to Mark's blog post is what I want to focus on in today's post here: specifically, on being girls' secret lover. Because often, when girls are calling or texting in front of you, the people they're contacting are the more "public" people in their lives, with whom they must keep up appearances. Oftentimes, the reason you're getting texted or called in front of in the first place is exactly because you aren't a public part of her life with public influence and accountability... and if you ask me, this is a very good thing.

Women nearly universally display a social behavior with men they like that's often referred to as "testing." Testing is what women do when they're looking to see if a man is strong and congruent with himself; in other words, if he really is all the man he's presenting himself to be.

Asking a man to do something for her, or teasing him with sexual suggestions to see if he jumps at the opportunity or gets overexcited, or dropping hints with regards to her own promiscuity or relationship status to see if he gets defeated and walks away – all those are "tests," and there are many other varieties.

Testing often gets a bad rap with men. It gets called annoying, frustrating, or petty – but still, all but the absolute most innocent, trusting, inexperienced women – the ones who don't know men any better yet – do it. But why do women test men, and how do you act in testing situations? That's the subject of this post: what to do when women test you.

My girl was over and we were talking earlier about how difficult a time it is for a woman to find a quality guy she likes a lot. She spooled off a quick list of men she'd been on dates with who hadn't made the cut: there was the older doctor who lied about his age, and the guy she went to the movies with who had touched her arm and creeped her out. But the one who stood out the most to me was the one she described as her "good friend."

This was a guy who took her out to walk on the ice over a lake in town that had frozen over. There, the guy professed to her that he would satisfy all her needs. At the moment when he said that, she briefly asked herself, "Huh. Could I have sex with this guy?" Her answer was no, it'd be weird. He was her friend.

And then she said something that really stood out:

"I like him as a friend. We can talk about anything. I'm like his guy friend. And he's like my girlfriend."

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.

Ever meet a girl, and get her contact information, and then start chatting with her via phone or text message, and then go to set up a date with her – maybe to get some food, maybe a drink, maybe to just chill and hang out and watch a movie at your place – only to have her offer a counterproposal that suited you far less? Perhaps she suggested going shopping, or that you join her out with a group of her friends, or come to some party she was attending.

Ever accept one of those counteroffers? If you did, you may very well have kicked yourself for going later, when you ended up getting slotted into the friend zone and never got together with the girl. Maybe, just maybe, a guy tooth-and-claws it, and fights off her other suitors, and eventually on Date #6 he gets her in the sack, but of course by that point she has him firmly pinned down into boyfriend territory. And maybe she even does end up becoming his girlfriend because by that point he's invested so much in her that he thinks she's better than the other women he has available.

This is what happens when you don't date on your terms. You don't get the girl most of the time. Actually, most of the time, you waste your time, and get slotted into the friend zone, or become a potential boyfriend at best.

Solution? Stop dating women on their terms, and start dating them on yours.

I've posted a few articles recently that deal with casual relations. "Do Women Only Want Sex?" cuts to the core of what, specifically, women want from men; "Sexiness is Critical to Casual Relations" discusses some research highlighting how important being sexy is to netting rapid intimacy with women.

A reader sent me an email the other day after reading some of the posts on rapid intimacy, asking if I can help identify what it is he might be doing wrong. An excerpt from his message:

“I just can't figure out how any guy can sleep around without misleading girls about his intentions. With a lot of girls, I feel like I'm in a weird zone where they think I only want casual sex, but that they aren't attracted to me enough, so they don't like me at all (and I don't know whether I'm not attractive enough for them or whether they just don't want casual sex.) In this zone, they don't really want me around cuz they see me just as a roving dick on the hunt. That's what honesty gets you... But maybe I need to be more honest about the side of me that wants to get to know them? How do I even do that? Currently I just try to have fun with people, which is how I got over the creepy vibe, but I still feel like I have this worthless-player vibe.”

Okay, so I have a pretty good feeling for where this gent is. He is, it seems to me, at the point where he's relying on being fun and entertaining to keep women's interest and get them to like him, but it isn't translating well to intimacy, and he feels that without being fun and entertaining, he doesn't have much else to offer and people dub him "creepy."

Kind of a Catch-22: being fun and entertaining means women don't see you as all that sexual, but dropping the fun and entertaining vibe means people don't want to hang around and that certainly isn't terribly conducive to bedding new girls either.

Now, there's a post on this site up about how to be a sexy man, and that's the first place I'll point anyone who wants to know how to start instilling the right kinds of emotions in a woman: interest, curiosity, intrigue, and arousal. And we talk a lot about the drawbacks of being the entertainer guy in "Reactions from Women, or Results with Women? So those are a couple of great places to start if you're looking to get out of the habit of being entertaining and into the habit of being sexy.

But if you drop the fun and entertaining slant, and you end up seeming creepy… what causes that? That's the main thing I'd like to address in this post; basically, how not to be the creepy guy.