Emotions

There are two types of people in the world, romantically-speaking:

• Those who always date the right person, and
• Those who always date the wrong person
  

The people who always date the right person are fairly consistently happy, contented, and have wonderful views of the opposite sex. They think dating is grand, and they’re still friends with their exes. Or at least they think warmly of them.

The people who always date the wrong person are fairly consistently ticked off, resentful, or disappointed, and often have scathing views of the opposite sex. They think dating is a grind, and they’re confused and unhappy, or even mortal enemies with their exes... when they’re not trying to get their exes back again, that is.

This article is about why people fall into one of these camps or the other: why some people always date the right person, and why others always date the wrong one.

content="If a girl doesn’t think you’re in control, her attraction and respect for you suffer. Yet, you needn’t be the uptight in-control guy to show her this.">

That sounds like a power-mad, insecure, control-freak title for an article, doesn’t it?

“She always needs to think you’re in control.”

Pretty outdated, right?

Especially in a world in which more men consider ‘masculinity’ a bad thing than a good thing:

In truth, we get plenty of guys who stumble upon Girls Chase articles (and mine in particular) who object to just this advice:

• “Why does the guy have to do everything?”
• “Why do I have to be in control?”
• “Why can’t women just take the lead sometimes?”

But this article isn’t so much about WHY you must lead, nor much about HOW to lead.

If you want to know more about that subject, check these articles out:

• When Women Test Men
• The Real Reason Many Men Can’t Get a Girl
• A Failed Relationship is a Failure of Leadership
• Do You Really Need to Learn Game to Get Girls?
• How to Be Decisive

Rather, this article is about keeping up appearances, and not giving a girl the impression that the guy she’s with is floating along, doesn’t have a clue, or is abdicating leadership of the courtship... whether to her, to Mother Nature, or to fate, luck, hope, or chance.

She always needs to think you are in control.

Because if she doesn’t, she ain’t hanging around.

You’re with a group of three girls you’ve just met at a nightclub, and you’ve really hit it off with one of the girls, this girl Ava. She’s cute, perky, and a whole lot of fun.

Suddenly, you’re yanked out of an engrossed conversation with Ava by a fracas nearby; one of the other girls in the group, Miria, is shouting at one of the nightclub’s bouncers.

First the other friend jumps in.

Then your girl, Ava, jumps in too.

You hang on the sidelines, unsure what to do.

You could feel it’d been going pretty well with Ava, and you thought you stood a pretty solid chance to pull her home tonight.

The argument between the girls and the bouncer end, with the bouncer telling Ava and the other friend that they need to keep Miria on a leash or he’s going to boot them out.

Ava and the two girls debate among each other, emotionally fraught. Finally, Ava turns back to you and says, “Sorry, I think we’re just going to leave.”

“It’s okay, I understand,” you say calmly. You aren’t sure exactly how to react, but you decide to play it cool and do your best to look unfazed. “Let’s trade cells so we can connect later on.”

“I’m really not in trading-numbers mood right now,” she says, “Sorry. I just want to go home.”

Then, she turns away, and her and her two friends take off.

Them’s the shakes, right?

Could it have gone any differently?

It could have – had you paced her reality, instead of freezing in the headlights.

There are, in romance, three kinds of men.

And before any of these three kinds of men is truly free to care about the women in his life and the others around him, he must make an inner journey that forces him to face his demons and let go of his fears of where these lead.

We all, in our own ways, search for a kind of absolution.

When we are young we expect that to come in the form of young love. Movies overwhelmingly portray it as “the happiest ending possible”, so why not? Some choose that path and succeed, some choose it and feel inadequate for doing so, and some choose to walk away from it (as I did).

But the complexities do not end there, and the human condition is fraught with astounding complexity and specificity for each and every one of us. Our lives are all set to a very unique mould, and no two are exactly alike. However, there are some things that are unilateral in their own quirky ways and I hope to share a few tips about life.

In my next article after this one I will describe two paths: one of the guy who chooses teen love, the other who doesn’t and walks another path. However, in this article I’m going to start by shortly describing another path and then afterwards share some techniques it uncovers.

There was a quite wonderful article in the New York Times the other day about the use of storytelling and narratives.

In the piece, “What Happens When Baseball-Stats Nerds Run a Pro Team?”, the authors reveal their discovery that simply conveying bare factual information ultimately proved less inspiring – despite its accuracy – and that when they began to spin a narrative around the reasons for their actions, players took this more to heart, put their emotions into the game, and started winning.

There’s a great parallel here with talking to girls, too: because if all you’re doing is conveying facts, you’ll struggle to get buy-in, pleasure, excitement, and attention... even if your facts are the best facts in the business.

As you know all too well if you read this site regularly, emotions are a woman’s bread and butter: she doesn’t want to know your details.

She wants to feel something. Facts don’t do this for her. Stories do.

If you can make her feel those up and down emotions, that thrill, and that excitement, she is as good as yours.

What are the differences between how a beneficial, robust mental model works, versus how robust-yet-harmful mental models (like victim mentality) or non-robust mental models yet clung-to models work?

I’ve been analyzing mental models a lot recently. In particular, how people can have extremely different, yet robust or at least unyielding mental models, and how each different kind of mental model produces different kinds of results.

For instance:

• Victim mentality is actually an extremely robust mental model. Individuals who view themselves as victims – and such individuals are extremely common across societies, of every sex, race, age, and creed – continually find reason to view themselves as the recipients of misfortune, find justification for their models, and receive feedback from the world that reinforces rather than disabuses them of their models

• Conversely, what I’d call winner, or success-driven, individuals also have extremely robust mental models. Individuals who view themselves as successes tend to be quite good at finding ways to pull victory out of defeat, at avoiding situations where they would suffer setbacks, and don’t spend much time dwelling on setbacks, other than from a problem-solving mentality. As a result, they spend little time in defeat and quickly dust themselves off even after most reasonably catastrophic failures
  

But it’s not just someone’s victim/winner orientation. It’s also the reliability of his predictions.

For instance, someone who sees himself as a victim has confidence in his mental model because his predictions are either correct, or he explains them away if they aren’t. He sees a pretty girl and says, “Well, she’ll reject me, of course,” and if he approaches and she does reject him, he says, “See? I knew it. Women always reject me.” If instead she’s friendly, he’ll be inclined to explain it away: “She must’ve been drunk” or “She doesn’t really like me... she was probably just being polite.”

Both victims and winners make predictions and their predictions either come true, or they attempt to explain to themselves (and others) why in this case the prediction failed, yet the failure does not violate their mental model overall. This makes these models robust.

Obviously, if they receive enough feedback to crash the model, they’ll be forced to reassess. But most people adopt models that seem to justify their experiences, and avoid experiences that may invalidate their models.

However, prediction is only the surface here – largely because it doesn’t give us a way to qualify the differences between different mental models (like victim and winner mentalities). So we need to add two more pieces.

I propose any robust, success-oriented mental model is comprised of three (3) bits:

• Predictive accuracy,
• Confidence in the model, and
• Harmonious choices and outcomes
  

If you’re reading a site like Girls Chase, there’s a fairly good chance you’re a rather defiant, rebellious, countercultural individual to some extent:

• You’ve got the whole of mainstream dating advice telling you to ‘just be yourself’ and wish upon a star and the right girl will come along if you just wait long enough, and any girl who doesn’t like you, well, that’s her problem, because you’re perfect as-is.

• You’ve got legions of nice guys out there swamping the radio with the tragic tales of the women who’ve cheated on them and broken their hearts, and drowning the theaters and television stations with romantic comedies that depict them losing women again and again to the bad boy until finally, one day, the girl realizes she’s tired of hooking up with sexy bad boys and wants someone who isn’t going to break her heart for the long-term, and there’s Mr. Nice Guy, ready to sweep up the pieces of her broken heart and try to heal and fix her with marriage.

• You’ve got women themselves telling you they don’t even like all those sexy guys they have sex with, and you should just stay the way they are and don’t change one bit. Don’t worry, someday when she’s done with the bad boys, you may yet get your shot with her.

• You’ve got the downers, who want you to know it’s impossible to get girls if you don’t have movie star looks, investment banker income, basketball player height, and the right racial background.

• You’ve even got books like The Game telling you you just need to memorize a few tricks, learn a few routines, and then basically repeat this script with every girl, and the flood gates will open up.

Yet, somehow, you’ve ended up here, studying the nuances of various tactics, fundamentals, and abilities, and coming at doing better with women in a systematic, skill-based way, where you mix experimentation and good old fashioned elbow grease to achieve the results you desire with women (whatever those results may be).

It’s pretty obvious you’re a defiant personality type... or at the very least, you’ve stumbled in here and are feeling defiance toward many of those other people and sources of information telling you to do things this way or that.

That brings me to today’s cautionary tale: be careful whom you’re defying.

Because defiance, improperly aimed, can be as big a handicap as it can a helper.