:rolleyes: No, my friend. I wish to hell it were. Life just ain’t that way all the time.
One reason is that we’re all individuals. We’re not just reliable equations of conditioning, where you push a button and get a result. And I see way too much of that in pickup teaching. They think they’re demystifying, but what they’re really doing is dehumanizing.
No. But what you seem to argue is that that’s all you need. You also need to connect in a lot of ways no one can explain - sometimes not even the partners.
That’s not a bug though - it’s a feature. It’s what makes a relationship intense and personal instead of just Tab A/Slot B.
But hey, I’ll give you 300 “friends”. You’re drinking way too much of your own koolaid if you think a single rational adult would believe you when you say you keep up with 300 unique individuals “at least once a week, and hang out with in person more than once a month”.
This whole pitch sounds analogous to Scientology the more you talk about it. A bunch of “techniques” that work in the field, but when you start actually dealing with the people on the inside, it’s the creepiest, most disfunctional set of people you’d ever cross the street to avoid.
No, the insecurity goes away as you become confident. That’s like saying when you’re scared of spiders, if you expose yourself to them enough that you no longer fear them, that fear will always be there under it all. No, you’ve re-wired yourself. Like being afraid to ride a bicycle and then learning how to do it, you don’t fear it anymore.
You can’t possibly be telling me no one has ever changed aspects of their personality like that, can you?
If I am someone who is scared to drive a car, then someone that I’m not is someone who is NOT scared to drive a car. If I learn to act like someone who’s confident driving a car, by learning the rules of the road and practicing driving a car, then I become someone who is not scared to drive a car. Thus I’ve become confident by acting like someone that I’m not.
Again, this is really basic stuff to me. If I’m completely missing your argument here, feel free to correct me but these statements sound kind of silly as they’re written.
If an attractive but low self-esteem woman walks into a bar, every guy in there will fall over himself to buy her drinks and chat her up and try to impress her. They’re not going to be high-quality men for the most part, but a lot of them will be attractive men who just like how she looks and are hoping she’s got something under the shy exterior.
Because of the Plain Jane part. I like girls who dress up, that’s my own personal taste.
I don’t see where anything I’ve said suggests that men DISlike confident women who are smart and take out the trash…just that a woman doesn’t NEED those things to still attract men.
And I don’t see where anything I’ve said suggests that an alpha guy isn’t an empathetic listener who does his part around the house without asking and has any problem with a wife earning more money than him. (in fact I do the dishes when I’m at my girlfriend’s place regularly without her asking, just because I appreciate her and I like to do nice things for her…but we’re having sex already, I’m not still trying to get a first date)
Oh. Okay. I didn’t realize it “just ain’t that way”. I was going by repeated experiments collectively carried out by hundreds of thousands of different men on hundreds of thousands of different women over the past 10+ years that pick-up has been really popular.
But ya, if you say it “just ain’t that way”, I guess that’s better than going by mass collections of results.
I’m being sarcastic because you’re being condescending by the way, if you lay off the rolley-eye smiles I’ll be happy to discuss this stuff a lot more civil.
You’re attributing “magic” to something that’s explainable, like attributing “gods” to the weather before science figured out causes behind it and allowed us to predict the weather. It sounds nicer from a feel-good perspective to say there’s “just something”, but we’re breaking down what that “just something” is to a collection of behaviors on both sides of the relationship to explain it.
Do you have a Facebook account? Twitter? Instant messenger? Cell phone that can text? E-Mail? It’s not difficult to keep in touch with people these days, especially if you enjoy it.
Any given night out at a nightclub I’ll run into 10 - 20 people I know. In a month it’s not difficult to run into 300 of them. Arrange a few parties or social events (wing nights, movie nights, etc.). It’s time-consuming but again, if you have fun doing it, it’s not difficult.
I’m not sure what I’ve said that would make you think I was dysfunctional. I’ve presented out-of-the-norm viewpoints, but I’m pretty sure most people reading this thread don’t get any kind of psycho serial killer vibe from me. I love women and I’m friendly to the people around me. People who hang out with me enjoy our time together, and girls that I’ve been with, even years back, like to keep in touch because we’re friends.
I’m typing in a pretty clinical way in this thread because I know that I’m trying to get points across in a public forum where, while most people are happy to calmly and rationally discuss things, a number of people will actively jump on anything I say that isn’t very carefully worded and start making weird cardboard puppet-master analogies and compare me to crazy Scientologists to try to ridicule me instead of discussing things.
But if we were chilling over a beer and shooting the shit you’d find I’m just a normal guy.
If your shy quiet insecure friend walks in looking like Megan Fox in a mini-dress and push-up bra, no guys are interested in her despite her low self-esteem?
Yet how many women complain “He was handsome but SO boring…” when they’re disappointed by a good looking guy with low self-esteem?
I’m not comparing you to crazy Scientologists. I’m comparing you to a “typical” Scientologist. They’ve come across a “cookbook” on how to deal with the world in a superficial way but when you dig deeper, the result is creepy attitude.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a superficial encounter in a bar I’d find you personable. That’s the whole point of your PUA creed. That’s the whole point of the techniques isn’t it? To make goobers feel like they fit in with a bunch of canned responses?
Like any good salesperson, you have to sell yourself before you can sell others, and I can see you’re sold on it yourself.
So instead of working on your real problems and social issues, you learn a bunch of techniques and use them so often it becomes second nature as a substitute. Sure it “works”. Yes, you have a ton of “friends”.
I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree. People in your view are apparently unable to change any part of themselves through learning more detailed information about something and experiencing new things repeatedly.
I don’t know how I’m going to teach my future son to play baseball if he doesn’t come out of the womb swinging a bat, shit!
Should I even laborate any further? Just think about it. You’re essentially slamming women who have dating difficulties as ugly losers.
I know for a fact that when I go into a bar, hardly anyone is falling out of their chairs to talk to me. Thank God I have that thing called self-esteem going for me or else I’d be questioning whether I look like a wart hog right about now.
I didn’t say no guys would be interested. I said all other things being equal, a woman who walks into the joint like a basket full of insecurity will have a harder time attracting men than a confident one. I mean, your own posts in this thread support this very non-controversial observation.
Funny how you raise the attractiveness bar to mini-skirt wearing Megan Fox levels, though. How about we work with the levels of attractiveness you’re most likely to come across in your typical bar, not a Hollywood set?
Also, be please careful how you’re attributing the posts you’re responding to. You have me saying things I haven’t.
What happens in bars is to relationships as swinging a bat is to baseball.
I’m not criticizing you for changing your behavior. I’m pointing out that focusing everything on superficial parts of the process isn’t going to get you anything more than superficial results. If that’s what you want, great. But I think most people want more.
Way I see it, the “techniques” are indeed superficial - but then, any version of meeting new people is going to be, at least initially, an exercise in superficiality.
Of course, the whole ‘notches in bedposts’ thing indicates that this scene is not for me, and never was - my ambition was never really (outside of fantasy!) to get a huge variety of sex, but to meet someone for a relationship.
The real concern is for those who can’t seem to meet anyone, because they suffer from shyness, are wholly introverted, etc. For those people, what is needed may be a touch of “superficiality” to get them through the intitial stages of social interaction. That being accomplished, presumably they can embark on a less-superficial relationship with the people they have now met.
For that task though, there is no need to adopt the whole panoply of PUA techniques, whether they “work” or not (there is also the possibility that they may “work” on women who are, likewise, mostly looking for notches-on-belts sort of thing). What is needed is the ability to flirt, which can I think be learned.
I didn’t say anything like that at all. I said guys are interested in hot girls despite their low self-esteem. I didn’t say “any girl who isn’t hot is a loser” because I didn’t say guys aren’t interested in girls who aren’t hot.
You probably don’t look like Megan Fox in a minidress when you go into a bar. That’s fine, I don’t see what you’re taking issue with here.
Agreed, I mis-read your earlier post and missed the “all other things being equal” part of “If they aren’t confident in themselves, all other things being equal they are at a disadvantage to those who are.”
Totally my bad, I apologize!
I agree with the part I’m quoting here, that she’ll have a harder time than a confident one. My argument was more that if she’s hot, but unconfident, guys will cut her more slack and still try to sleep with her compared to her male equivalent, a hot but unconfident guy, thus my mention of the handsome/boring combo.
That gets into interesting psychology. I don’t really go by the numbering system in terms of physical attractiveness (everyone likes something different) myself…but the perceived “hotness” of a person is completely relative to the perceived “hotness” of the people surrounding them.
In a generic small-town dive bar, there’ll be one or two good looking girls, who will feel and be treated like Megan Fox because compared to the girls around them, they’re “the best”. In LA, girls that look like Megan Fox will feel and be treated as average because there are one or two extraordinarily better looking girls. If that same girl from LA visited a small-town bar, her perceived value would be astronomical.
I don’t see what changing the level of attractiveness will do with regards to this discussion however…elaborate?
Ah shit, my bad! I’m new to this forum and the Quote system is kind of inconvenient for quoting a ton of different people in one post haha I can’t seem to do the Edit/ask-mod-to-confirm-editing-reason thing like I could when I first posted it…is there a way for me to fix that?
I use bars because that’s where I spend a lot of my time being in my 20s. But the same pick-up principles apply anywhere. Malls, school, work, church groups, you name it. Attraction is attraction.
Often girls at the bar that most guys would consider quality relationship material are the ones who got dragged their by their friends to celebrate a birthday or something, but don’t really want to be there. There are plenty of those girls out on any given night.
I met a girl I got into a 2 year relationship with at a bar, and it was the first time she had been out at a bar in a year. She was sober and just there because her friends from work dragged her out, and I thought she was cute and made a move. She was a virgin and didn’t put out for like 3 months.
As I’ve mentioned before that’s why most guys get into the game. Most guys don’t have aspirations to be the next Hugh Hefner, hell some of them actively dislike the whole concept of notches on the bedpost. But the same things that attract the one night stand attract the relationship girl…the ONS is just faster.
Agreed. Pick-up is just a way of getting your foot in the door. If I’m interested in a girl beyond sex, I just get to know her in the morning, and get her number and we hang out again and again until we have the same non-superficial relationship anyone else has…I just made sure our relationship was sexual instead of risking friend-zoning it.
Agreed. There is an epic abundance of pick-up material out there, but most guys don’t need to know THAT much of it. I find it interesting from a human psychology perspective, so I’ve studied it all in depth (thus my posting in this thread to provide the voice of someone who’s deeply studied in it VS surface-guessing).
All most guys need to know is a few basic concepts, like that teasing a girl is okay, having standards is okay, not being ashamed of themselves is okay, dropping innuendo into a conversation is okay, women like sex too, etc.
There’s no reason every guy needs to dedicate a large chunk of their life to it. I felt I needed a complete overhaul and found the process fun, so it became a hobby for me, but these days it’s just something that happens when I’m out and about socializing.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
For that task though, there is no need to adopt the whole panoply of PUA techniques, whether they “work” or not (there is also the possibility that they may “work” on women who are, likewise, mostly looking for notches-on-belts sort of thing). What is needed is the ability to flirt, which can I think be learned.
[/QUOTE]
Right. By definition, anybody who really tries hard to learn pickup techniques is trying really hard to meet women and develop the skill of getting along with the women he meets, and anybody who tries really hard to meet women and get better at getting along with them is going to be more successful at doing it than when he wasn’t trying that hard. Which is cool.
I think it’s also true that a guy who spends as much time hitting on women as the average burgeoning pickup practitioner but doesn’t do so by virtue of any canned lines or forced sexualization of the conversation would be more successful than when he wasn’t trying hard. And that a third guy, who never tries to pick up women at all, but spends as much time trying to have conversations with people as the first two guys, would also have more success picking up women than when he wasn’t trying.
The trouble is, there’s these other guys who either aren’t having as much sex as they would like or just generally hate the fact that it seems like women get attention for nothing and men don’t, and they’re pointing at the institution of pickup and saying that it’s some kind of great equalizer, that any objections to pickup are grounded more or less in misandry. As if because of some societal imbalance the only way to put your penis on the path to a vagina is to learn how to more subtly steer a conversation about sunglasses to one about Flunitrazepam. Essentially, like the average callow male, possessed of fewer schlong notches than he’d like, is forced to learn tricks if he’s ever going to get the amount of tang he feels is the appropriate amount. Which tricks, naturally, were discovered by pickup artists and published on the internet, and advertised in a sidebar to a screen near you. And that just isn’t true, and is where the whole practice starts teetering on the edge of some kind of danger zone - because it encourages the disgruntled angry men to think in terms of, like, acquisitions of property.
You can have more sex by making yourself more attractive to the people you want to have sex with. A lot of these pickup techniques are different ways to do that. But there are ways to do it that are not those pickup techniques. Which I hope we can all just acknowledge, but which I worry about when I see things like:
[QUOTE=Recliner]
Ever meet a pickup artist who led an enviable life? I haven’t. They tend to be middle-aged, and while they do appear to sleep with more women than the average man…they don’t appear to live very happy lives.
[/quote]
, which makes me wonder whether maybe the pickup crowd isn’t so clear on the distinction, either.
Attraction is attraction and superficial is superficial. Everything you write screems superficial. You have no introspective capability whatsoever as near as I can tell. And it would probably be a negative for your “system” anyway.
The ironic thing is that your system is designed to train goobers to not seem like goobers when pitching to a target they’re “wooing”, and it doesn’t help you at all from looking like a goober when you’re "wooing"us.
Way I’d put it is this: there is an off-putting amount of misogyny, entitled self-pity and snake-oil salesmanship associated with some who are proponents of these techniques. However, some guys who use them don’t display this, so I don’t think it is a necessary part of it. In particular, at least from his replies, I don’t think TheWhoToTheWhatNow is displaying any of these. For all I know, these techniques may work perfectly well for him. He seems to me a decent dude.
My point all along is that the techniques may be a bit of a “Dumbo’s Feather” (that is, they work because the guy using them thinks they work and they give him the confidence to flirt and accept rejection with equanimity). People can of course do the same thing, but without the ‘techniques’.
This has been my experience as well. It’s hard for everyone to hear the voice inside themselves, though, especially when what we want is interaction with others - it’s natural to want to change to be more like them, or more like whoever it is they seem to want. In addition, it’s very rare to hear people who love us saying “listen to yourself” when we are in psychological crisis. They too want the answer to come from outside.
There really aren’t. And that ideal of masculinity is broadening only slowly and selectively - we accept the SAH dad but not the childfree, the awkward techie but not the shy artist, the mysteriously single 29yo but not the 39yo. (Someone tell me if I’m coming too close to the “everyone deserves to get laid” position here.)
It’s not the only path, I explained before that there are other ways to develop confidence, value, respect and other attributes that are attractive. Learning to flip sexual switches is just a really efficient path if you like having a lot of sex or a variety of sexual partners.
Clooney’s just a natural alpha, but his lifestyle is an ideal one for a lot of pick-up artists. Pick-up is still new enough that even a guy who got in on it way back when it was just starting to gain ground is only maybe 8 years into it. When that guy is 60, he may look back at his life and be sad and miserable and feel like it was a giant waste, but we won’t know that until the average PUA hits his death bed.
In the meantime, being able to make new friends easily and meet and attract women easily is pretty damn fun.
I spent the past 10 years being introspective, and all my shy years before that being introspective. Now I know myself inside and out, I don’t need to sit and analyze it. I have a set of values, goals, standards, etc. that were forged from introspection and experience socializing with an excessively high number of various types of people. I am rock-solid in knowing who I am. That’s why I don’t resort to calling people goobers.
I’m not trying to woo you at all, I’m explaining pick-up concepts to a group people who haven’t studied pick-up. You don’t have to like my answers, but that doesn’t make them not backed in the experience of massive amounts of group experimentation and study.
Yes. She had been almost raped when she was younger and had a lot of fears around men and sex. I helped her work through her issues and open up to become, now, a normal out-going girl who’s not terrified of men.
If you meant that sarcastically like, “is that all you view her as, some chick who didn’t put out for a few months, you shallow monster?”, I loved her like crazy, she’s a wonderful human being in general, but since this thread is about pick-up and the general view is that a PUA is looking for a quick/easy fuck from some ditzy bar slut who puts out for anyone with a penis that says hello, I figured I’d mention that to demonstrate that pick-up isn’t focused entirely on sex.
Agreed. It feels like people read The Game and judge it all as “all those guys are just trying to trick a girl to fuck her and throw her away when they’re done using her”. That’s entirely possible to do, just like you can Karate kick a child in the head after your Karate class. But it’s not a necessary component and a lot of martial artists would frown about ninja-kicking a kid.
You can get laid saying anything you want to girls, if you’re confident. It’s just when you focus on making sure the interaction has a sexual nature to it, and you watch for signs of attraction and escalate on them quickly instead of missing or ignoring them, it makes sure the nature of the relationship is sexual.
All the PUA method is doing is taking what naturally happens in an interaction that leads to a relationship over the span of months and months (take the example from earlier in the thread where olivesmarch said her future husband touching her at the right moment changed her view of him), and condensing it down into something much more efficient.
Someone who met their significant other through a social circle and over years came to get to know them and date and then eventually escalate things to sex is flipping the exact same attraction switches as a PUA.
PUAs are just learning to flip those swtiches faster.
So if a woman walks into a bar and no guys fall over themselves to talk to her, what conclusion should be drawn? The clear implication here is that she’s not attractive. In other words, an ugly loser. We can read what you mean pretty clearly; you didn’t even use any weasel words.
Aside from the bizarreness that is you using Megan Fox as a benchmark for female attractiveness, this sentence…
…is completely unrelatable to me and also confirms my suspicions that you might not be as enlightened about women and relationships as you seem to think. If you really believe a person’s attractiveness is relative to their environment, your future wife should be worried.
That she doesn’t look like Megan Fox but has high self-esteem. Or that she doesn’t look like Megan Fox and has low self-esteem.
I don’t see why you would take offense to this observation. Plenty of average looking high self-esteem girls are out there, watching guys around them drool over the super hot looking girls. Those girls are probably fantastical and awesome, but that doesn’t change the fact that the better looking girl is getting more attention.
I actually don’t like her, haha I just picked a popular name that society has dubbed “sexy”.
If everyone in a room works at McDonald’s and one person gets a job interning at a law firm, that guy seems amazing to his friends working at McDonald’s. But at the law office, that guy is the lowest rung.
If a hot girl is surrounded by ugly girls, she seems hotter than if she were surrounded by hot girls. I’m pretty sure the concept of relative value is basic psyche…
A donut is not an amazing food. But if all you’ve eaten for months is plain rice, a donut seems amazing. If all you’ve eaten for months is donuts, a donut is not that amazing.
I’m sorry if you have a problem with my wording. Would you feel better if I said “We didn’t mutually express our love in the form of romantic physical love-making full of deep meaningful eye-contact, candle-light, and a long comforting cuddle-session afterward”?
You don’t need to know those details. I already explained my reasoning for even mentioning that we didn’t have sex right away in my last post, and before that I explained the reason I’m using quick clinical terms to describe things, you’re just trying to paint me as callous now.
