Emotions

There’s a little-discussed concept in seduction called “backward rationalization”, where someone attributes reasons for a choice or action after-the-fact, rather than before it.

A simple example is you bring a girl home after a date and escalate on her, nearly to the point of sex. If you then have sex, there’s a good chance afterward she looks back and says, “Well, we had sex because he was attractive / charming / had a good body / etc.”

If on the other hand you do not have sex, there’s a fair chance she looks back after and says, “Well, we didn’t have sex because I wasn’t really that into him.”

In both cases, it may have simply been that you pushed a little harder to get past last minute resistance in the first scenario, and in the second you got winded and gave up. But the narrative she retains about why you slept together or didn’t is completely different.

Backward rationalization can mean the difference between her thinking you’re great or her thinking you’re not... all due to the outcome you achieve with her.

If you ever watch good verbal movie seductions – like, say, one featuring Sean Connery or George Clooney – you’ll notice there’s often a moment when the male suddenly cuts all the cute stuff, leans in, and says something that locks the tension in and dials it up through the roof.

This is usually the moment of the seduction when you smile to yourself and say, “Wow, he’s good.”

Sometimes when one of these men do this, the woman in question is going off on a tangent, or rambling, or even panicking.

And then he just hushes her up, leans in, drops a little word bomb on her, and the tension goes through the roof.

If they’re somewhere private, they may start kissing... then disrobing. If they’re in public, the tension might be thick enough to chop with a meat cleaver (and the man will follow it up either by lightening the mood a bit to avoid cresting emotions too high and causing the spell to break... or by pulling her somewhere private, if it’s an option).

For the sake of discussing this technique more easily, I’m going to call the phrases the male uses ‘tension locks’; there are four (4) of them, they can be really effective, and best of all, you needn’t be a movie star or a master seducer to use them.

You just need to know what they are, and when to put them into play.

Ever sleep with a new girl, only to end up feeling empty inside once all is said and done?

Ever struggle with seeing yourself as a victim, blaming the world for not giving you what it owes you?

Ever start taking successes and failures far too personally, and letting them mess with and control your emotions?

Ever let your own false sense of superiority lead you to treat other people in ways you later wish you hadn’t?

Sometimes it feels like you might never win. Everyone seems to have their game together except you. You feel like you are always trying to “catch up”. It eats away at you subconsciously until you seek the lows you are used to. You rationalize away fleeting successes. You feel overwhelmed and, worst of all, you aren’t sure you enjoyed it all that much.

Recently I have been afforded a window of opportunity to study this feeling in myself again. It has been a long time since I have felt like this with women, but now as I reflect upon it I think it is a topic worthy of getting into for you guys.

In any endeavor there are two kinds of difficulty:

• Those obstacles that can be overcome by the resources you have access to (in the woods you can make a fire to keep warm),

• And those obstacles that cannot be attained by seemingly any means (in those same woods you find out what it takes to survive).

In response to these two types of difficulty there are often two ways people respond: they become a "workaholic" in regards to the things they can influence, or they become a "protestor" for a certain kind of symbolic change that will modify what is attainable and what isn't.

These two kinds of difficulties lead to much of what you can see in the world, whether it be the man protesting how girls need to change, or the man who constantly strives to be "on top" so that he might have greater perceived value than others.

When it comes to HARD work both types of men have justifications for their own version.

Whether the argument is about responsibility or about change often shapes a man's image to the rest of the world. Is he hard at work at being the best of the choices we have, or is he hard at work to expand/change those choices? Both approaches have their merits, but I introduce you to these two approaches to illustrate a third kind of difficulty.

Heart.

In the article on bids for connection, a commenter asked about the following fear about random people recognizing him as, essentially, 'that pickup artist guy', and creating trouble for him:

“What's really missing is in your articles to cover - most men have rooted lifestyles, so whether they know it consciously or not they meet mostly the same people every day. We are aware that coworkers don't change daily, but other people - people who goes to the same shops, uses the same public services are pretty much the same people, and if you live in a 500,000-1,500,000 people city you think consciously that you always meet different people, but in most cases the people you see around are the same people you've seen two weeks or two days before and just don't care to remember them. I've experimented with it and seen that there are people I meet pretty much everyday or at least once in a week, because of daily schedule which is highly repetitive. I notice the effects of what they call this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem which in a nutshell means that running into the same items (people, numbers whatever) is more likely than it may seem. If you have 10000 people using public services at the same time, and then you see ~20 all the time around you, it doesn't mean that you run into the same person only 0.5% of the time, it's much higher percent actually and it grows with every day you expose yourself to the world until you expose yourself to the same and same people again and again without consciously knowing it.”

He goes on to discuss the fear of being called out by a "nagging old lady or angry psycho of some kind" who may say something mean, and notes that a "large clump of guys [may] never start the game because of emotionally feeling the high percentage of such shaming happening [i]s a big danger to their identities of "good guys" they work so hard to preserve."

It's a perfectly natural concern and, in fact, one I wondered about myself early on. It's one worth paying some attention to, in all honesty, and I'll tell you why and how to do that in this post as well.

However, the biggest lesson you'll see with this kind of thing is the same one this same commenter notes at the start of this same comment: "You've got hundreds of articles less or more discussing pretty much the same topic of "Just move your ass and do the thing, accept early failures and later get awesome results!""

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I might as well save you 10 minutes if you don't feel like reading: the advice here is going to be exactly this: just move your ass and do the thing... and this fear magically vanishes. -Poof!-

Surprised? No? Well, let's look at why, at least.

In my article “Tactics Tuesdays: Calling Her When Texts Don’t Pan Out”, commenter AnonDude asked the following:

“I found that interesting and it would be great if you could write a post on different styles and goals of seduction, pros and cons of each, combinations of different styles and stuff like that.”

I thought this’d make for a fun article, so decided to write this one next.

Now, this might not necessarily be as practical an article, since, as you’ll see, you are what you are and you like what you like and you don’t have much, if any, conscious control over that.

Nevertheless, this may still be useful for you: we’ll be looking at what you want, why you do what you do, and what things you ought to be focused on (and what things not).

Let’s talk about what the 3 sorts of lady-killer are... and figure out which one you are.

It’s Thursday afternoon, you planned on hitting the streets (or was it bars?) to chat up some girls, but as the day is coming to a close and you feel the daily stresses are taking their toll on you, you find yourself thinking how maybe today is not the best day to do it, after all:

• “I had a stressful day.”

• “I need to wake up early tomorrow.”

• “I don’t feel like my best self, and surely it won’t be as effective…”

You even start bargaining with yourself:

“Hey, you know what, I better hit the gym after work, eat a healthy meal – I’ve been meaning to improve my physique for some time now. Here’s my chance.”

Or

“I could stay at work for a little while longer and cover some of tomorrow’s tasks. This way tomorrow I’ll have an easier day and feel so much more energetic to go out and meet women.”

Then it hits you…

“Yes! Tomorrow I will feel so much more like it, I will have a good night’s sleep, wake up earlier, get myself ready and sexy, and I’ll even talk to twice as many women for skipping today. Yes, tomorrow!”

So you go home. You didn’t stay at work to finish tomorrow’s tasks nor did you hit the gym on your way back. Instead of a healthy meal you grabbed an XL combo meal at a fast food joint and stayed up late watching re-runs of “The Office”.

And yet for some reason you kind of feel good about yourself. After all, tomorrow you will make it all worth it!