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Not what you think;

How many girls have you asked out? How many straight nos have you received?

Back in college I asked out a string of girls, big string, tried to ask one a day for a while and learned several things.

1) A girl will give her number to a stray dog.

2) You can tell a girl wasn’t interested if she doesn’t pick up her phone, or you receive a call from her boyfriend.

3) If a girl gives you a straight no, thank her, she just refrained from wasting your time.

I went through the full scenario at a conservative estimate at thirty times. Pretty frustrating, but the good that came out of it was that it made me dedicated to understanding the whole issue of men and women.

Here’s the deal, women are human beings. Being human, just like the rest of us, they want to avoid hurting someone’s feelings and avoid confrontation. It’s a lot easier to just give a guy your number (interestingly enough I never received a fake number, she just didn’t pick up), than to give him a straight no and risk a conversation where a guy demands she explain why she won’t go out with him. Not a pleasant prospect.

At first I was angry, stayed angry for a while. The worst part was hopes being raised by getting a phone number, and then being dashed. Again and again. And Again. When a girl gave me a straight no after fifteen flakes I verbally thanked her for not wasting my time.

The fact of the matter is things are a lot more complicated than they were in my father’s day. According to him the standard sequence was, you asked a girl out, she said yes or no, if she said no you acted like a man and moved on. If she said yes and after a few dates declined again, you acted like a man and moved on. Saved women the unnecessary experience of having to justify herself and saved men from a lack of clarity. Not so now.

What’s the solution? Get better with women in general. The more attraction you generate on the front end, the more likely she is to pick up, and I tell you it feels great when you finally hear that voice on the other end of the line.

Next, accept it for what it is. If a girl doesn’t pick up, leave a message, ask her to respond, if she doesn’t move on. Don’t take it too hard if it doesn’t go your way. If she isn’t straight with you, it’s not a serious failing. Don’t get angry, don’t get bitter, it’s just the rules of the game as it stands. If it happens a few times, no big deal luck of the draw.

If it happens thirty times in a row, check for a whole in your game. Move forward, get feedback, adjust course. Don’t overthink, don’t underthink, remember your principles. As long as you move forward and adjust based on feedback it will get better.

Michael D.

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On a gut level we all know that if we don’t have real hope about something, we can’t move forward to getting it. We know that real hope, the belief that something good is going to come our way, is kind of the fuel of real courage, real guts. I also know that a lot of my attempts to impress women failed because I didn’t really think I had a shot, but was just going through the motions. That’s why finding out that a girl likes you beforehand makes it A LOT easier to “be cool” around her. You have hope, so you take heart and charge in, because you know that the risk is small.

This is why it seems difficult to have better social skills with women in general. If you’re talking to a girl that you don’t know you’re flying blind with regard to whether or not she likes you. And, I know it was true for me, that I had a general attitude that the cards were stacked against me. I also didn’t think that there was anything I could really do, not really, to change myself.

Why did I think this way? Because I felt it. Somewhere along the way I picked up enough bad experiences to implant the idea in my mind and the feeling in my body that, hey, you know you’re not good enough. There are only two opinions in the world you can never escape from, God’s opinion of you, and your opinion of yourself. So, my opinion was no good.

Saying that you have to get success first, to believe that you are capable of attracting women is backwards. If you don’t start out believing “I am good enough”, then you won’t get success, or, if you do, you’ll still feel like a fraud. But, the good news is that if you come from this place of hopelessness, you don’t have to stay there.

The key is to get your beliefs in line with reality. The fact that you have free will, that you can make better decisions, learn new skills, is a fact. Read bios of people who’ve turned their lives around. Look for success stories. Look at the Bible, where people are consistently blessed by God for doing right, and reproved for doing wrong. God is not cruel, I don’t believe He is harsh on people for things that are beyond their control. I also don’t think He’s arbitrary, He blesses people who please Him, and what they do to please Him is under their control. But, it’s a fact that gets sidelined in the face of bad emotions and memories of past failures.

“Manliness” is a virtue, it’s the chief thing that is attractive to women and is heavily under our control. The key exercise is, when faced with a memory of past failure, or bad emotions about interacting with women, is to consciously reject it as untrue that you can’t do better. Then act like you can do better. Course correct.  A little courage, and you’ll find you feel better about yourself and your prospects almost instanteously.It may be a while before your feelings and beliefs  consistently (every time) coincide with each other, where you not only improve, but feel great about the process (and positive emotions shine through to women, very attractive), but it’s a nearly inevitable result.

Small steps towards acting by by the truth, and rejecting hopelessness not only as unpleasant, but as false, will reap some of the biggest rewards in your relationships with women, perhaps more than anything else. It’s foundational.

Michael D.

We all know the laundry list of what women say they like in men, “confidence, “funny”, etc. And the truth is that this is actually pretty accurate, women do like these things.

Unfortunately it’s also true that trying to be confident and funny leads to a man bombing nine times out of ten. Knowing why women say these things, and why your attempts fail, however can lead you to the key to creating instant real attraction to women. Not knowing why is the root of the problem that most men when they try to “be what women want” and end up crashing and burning.

Women aren’t being dishonest. They really do like confident, funny men. The thing is, confident, funny behaviors are “secondary”. They are the side effects of the primal qualities of the naturally attractive man. He acts confident because he is strong and courageous, and that strength and courage creates changes in his body language and personal style which women label confidence. He says humorous things, because he is relaxed and secure, the same way it’s always easier to be funny around your friends, you are relaxed and secure with them.

This is also why attempts to be confident or funny fail when you directly pursue them. When you go after side effects instead of primal principles, you come off as “macho”, posturing inauthentic masculinity, or “clownish”, humor that stems from a desire to be liked more than anything else.

Most of what concerns us are really the secondary effects of the major choices that we make. Thoughts present themselves to our minds and we validate or invalidate them based on our real principles, leading to action or inaction. A man who postures at manliness is a man who has validated the idea that he is not a man, but has to pretend to be to get what he wants. A man who is really confident has validated the idea that he is a man and doesn’t need to posture.

The concrete steps you can take are as follows. Courage is present in all of us a little bit. We have all done brave things, even if they were only little brave things. We know how to be courageous. But courage is like a muscle, to get stronger, you have to use it. Every time a fearful thought presents itself to your mind, their reaches a point, where you can make a deliberate choice to either validate that thought, accept it as genuine, or invalidate it, not let it be a factor. And we all know when a fear is big enough to legitimately change our actions, nobody feels guilty about not walking into traffic. It is the illegitimate fears that nail us, that weaken our strength, cause us to feel guilty and think ill of ourselves.

Every fear is like an object being presented to you, in your mind,  regardless of your feelings, you also know whether it should cause you to change course or not. Fear of a girl you don’t know not liking you is total nonsense. So, you can validate it, and get the bonus prizes of shame, guilt, and regret, or you can invalidate it, with the added bonuses of increased strength and confidence.

No one can make this decision for you, which is kind of like being a man,

Michael D.

…RIGHT NOW!

In the Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis describes the present as the point of time in our experience which most resembles eternity. It is the only time where choices can be made that can result in happiness, or unhappiness later.

About a week ago, I met up with a girl I had briefly went out with a year ago. We got to talking about dating and related issues and I was open and honest with her. I described how I should have “handled” some of her behavior in the past. She had a problem with cancelling at the last minute, and back then I put up with it, even when it was clear that it was done for reasons that basically stated that I wasn’t a priority. As we spent the evening together, she got flirty, touched my hip, etc., things she didn’t do while we were dating. In short I acted like a man, and by the end of our time she wanted to get back together.

I told her no. Nice enough girl, but not for me.

The point being, she reacted to the way I was acting RIGHT THEN. How I acted in the past was not nearly as real to her as the way I was acting right then.

If you screw up, the tendency is to either retreat or overcompensate, as a way of distancing yourself from a mistake. None of that really works, it can usually be sensed for what it is. We all know how desperate “try hard” behavior is kind of repulsive. The guy who tries too hard to be funny, or puts on macho airs, is a figure of fun.

If attracting women can be narrowed down to one quality it is “manliness”, the quality of being a man. If you do so something “unmanly”, like act insecure, for example, the only cure is to start acting manly right now. Not to overcompensate, clearly the action of an unmanly guy trying to bolster himself in the eyes of others, or show cowardice, perhaps the deadliest failing regarding “manliness”, but to act manly.

Acting manly puts more money in the account that you just drew from by screwing up. As a result your mistakes will more than likely be forgiven and blown past like they didn’t happen. One of the greatest lessons I learned is that people are really forgiving if you bring extra value into their life. On the darkside, this is why sometimes even really great girls will stick with guys are contemptible, but manly, just because the attraction is “too strong”.

You can’t go back in time, and you can’t act in the future. No doubt rectifying past mistakes and planning for the future are good things to do, but everything important definitionally happens in the present. Focus your efforts there and making yourself secure, your confidence and personal power will grow,

It doesn’t happen any other way,

Michael D.

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