You don’t have to have sex with lots of partners if you don’t want to. That’s the point, it gives you the choice. And your GF or wife is free to do what she wants, you just try to be the most attractive guy you can be so that what she wants is you.
An alpha male can provide for a woman if he chooses to. But it comes from a different place than it does when it comes from a beta male. A beta male buys a girl dinner because under the “I just like doing nice things for girls” front his brain thinks it’ll show he’s a gentleman and she’ll be attracted to him. An alpha male buys a girl dinner because she’s been good to him and deserves it and he doesn’t care if it affects her attraction for him.
When I was socially akward and offered to buy a girl a drink, it was because I was hoping she’d stick around and talk to me and maybe I’d have a chance to impress her…needy and beta.
Now I’ll occasionally buy a girl a drink but it’ll be because she’s genuinely impressed me and in my mind I’m rewarding her for being a quality person. Non-needy and alpha.
Usually this is the point where some nice guy will jump in here and respond “Whatever man!! I just LIKE doing nice things for girls, because I’m a gentleman. I’m not just trying to get into their pants, I don’t have ulterior motives! You wouldn’t understand that because you’re just some asshole player.”
It’s very hard for guys to wrap their head around the “what kind of place is this action of mine coming from” distinction because they’ve been conditioned by society to tell themselves they’re just doing nice things for girls because they’re gentlemen and they don’t really care if the girl sleeps with them or not, because only asshole players admit they want sex. Until a guy can cut through his own conditioning and get down to the base-level, he’ll continue to act beta until he ends up frustrated and confused.
I’m open about my feelings in my day to day life with my girlfriend, considerate of her, do the dishes for her before I leave her apartment, cuddle with her, etc. and I enjoy all those things. But I do them from a place of rewarding her and doing them because I like doing them, not because I’m supplicating to her and hoping tonight’ll be the night she puts out in a sexless relationship, and at the end of the day she respects it more.
See, this is sorta what I’m talking about, though I dunno if I can explain it well - when discussing your own relationships, or what you see in those of others, you seem to be discussing two patterns of motive for doing stuff - essentially, reward (good, alpha-male) and supplication (bad, beta-male behaviour).
There is a constant theme of this dichotomy going on. It sounds almost like a Skinnerian Behaviouralist from another planet were to come, analyze human relationships, and mimic what it thought the was the best pattern for having one.
This doesn’t seem to leave any room for sentiment, emotion, depth of feeling. It appears to be all about risk-reward, stimulus-response.
Now, I do not deny that when first meeting people, one is of necessity shallow - after all, one has nothing more to go by; flirting is shallow by definition, and there is nothing bad about that.
But in this case, it would seem that flirting has taken over into a whole lifestyle, overshadowing every other aspect of relationship, probably because it is based on a powerful, sorta-scientific behavioralist/evolutionary theory: that in order to flirt successfully, one must transform oneself into the sort of person who sees everything in a relationship in terms of risk/reward, stimulus/response, reward vs. supplication.
Or at least, so it appears, from reading the posts. I readily concede that there may be depths of feeling that do not appear in the posts.
The thing is that this is happening all around you. You might not be conscious of it, or notice it, but it’s going on constantly. We joke in the community that it’s like The Matrix where Neo chooses between the red and blue pills. Once you take the red pill, you can’t go back. You can’t un-learn what you learn and you can’t un-see things that you learn to see.
Think of it like becoming really knowledgable about Football. You see the game WAY differently than someone who’s a casual fan sees it. You’re both watching the same game, but you’re seeing players do things that affect the outcome of the play and the casual fan has no idea those things are even going on, let alone how they affect the play.
That’s what makes it hard to explain to people, and makes those people pooh-pooh it as overthinking.
So when you say “that seems like it reduces feelings/emotion to a stimulus-response system”, well, it does. But those things ARE based on stimulus-response, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.
It’s scary to consider that which I believe is part of the squicky eww factor and/or hostility pick-up runs into when normal people skim over the concepts, because what does that say about free will, a God/creator, souls, destiny, Artificial Intelligence, etc.?
But at the end of the day, any social interaction I see, I can instantly break down the hows and whys of what went on and those things will consistently follow the concepts PUA is deconstructing and methodizing. You can’t do this if you don’t dedicate a chunk of time to studying it, and for the first while you have to consciously make an effort to see it, but down the road it’s just instant calculations your brain is doing.
A normal person may attribute things to magical concepts like “he has an aura” or “I just had a bad feeling about it” or “feminine intuition”. But a PUA says “no, what’s happening is my brain is taking in thousands of bits of information and processing it really quickly and presenting it to me efficiently summarized in the form of a gut feeling”.
Thanks for being civil about it. I’m totally happy to try to explain this side of things to people who are legitimately curious but I know it’s a VERY different way of thinking…I know that because I used to be “normal”.
Two follow-up examples to the Matrix thing, to show how totally normal it can be and how fucked up it can be:
Fucked up example most people will call robotic and fucked up (this is how the world looks to me):
A guy is talking to a girl, I speak just slightly higher than he does and she glances at me and turns her body language very slightly away from him. As I speak, he tries to interrupt and ask her something but her eyes are locked on mine and her voice tone is now slightly dismissive. I now know she’s into me more than him and if I continue to look at her and turn my body slightly away from him as well, we’ll have “locked him out of the set” which will put social pressure on him because he now looks like the akward third-wheel, and he’s in a Chess “Check” style position where there’s no way he can react (aggressive, pleading, etc.) that will win her back and he instinctively can feel this and will cave to the social pressure of feeling like everyone is staring at him (they’re not) so he’ll turn and walk off.
This all happens in the span of a second and at the start I had to consciously think about this stuff and was running behind the interaction trying to catch up to a moving car. Now I’m ahead of the car because I’ve been in combinations of the parts of this interaction thousands of times before and shared the collective experiences of thousands of other PUAs who’ve been in thousands of these situations before, and my brain calculates this instinctively. It allows me to react in an optimal manner and predict likely outcomes to various actions.
Normal example most people wouldn’t have a problem with:
A guy is told by a girl “When a woman complains she doesn’t want you to FIX the problem, she just wants you to LISTEN to her and agree that Sally in the office IS a bitch! That’s the problem with guys, they always want to fix stuff but sometimes girls just need to vent and know that someone acknowledges their feelings, they don’t need a solution!!”
So when a girl complains to him, before then he would try to fix things because that’s what guys do, but he remembers this girl’s advice and thinks “wait, she’s complaining about Sally at the office…I was GOING to tell her to write up a formal letter of complaint to fix this, but I think she just wants me to listen to her, so instead I’ll just say Sally sucks! Holy shit, that advice worked, she’s happy again!! Wow, lesson learned! Don’t try to fix things when girls complain!!”
These two examples are exactly the same, it’s just the first one is taken to a very very very extreme level that you only get to after going through PUA training for years. People have a problem with the fucked up example, but not the normal “don’t fix things for a girl” one, even though logically if they accept one they should accept the other.
Well, any theory that claims to have excessive explanatory power triggers my instincts - not as in “oh, scary, think of the implications!” but as in “oh, self-delusional, no one theory explains everything about human behaviour”.
The analogy to a football game is instructive. Human behaviour often does have “game” like elements to it, admittedly. But that is not all there is to it. Even a football player occasionally stops playing football, relaxes, watches the sunset, has philosophical discussions with people who are (or are not) also football players, drinks a beer, has sex, etc.
You could know everything there is to know about the rules of football - be the world’s greatest expert on the game - and still not really understand that football player as a person, let alone a whole team of them. That’s because, as important as that game undoubtedly is to most football players, it is not their whole life, or at least, so one hopes. Similarly, the “game” aspects of relationships are not the whole relationship, or at least, not for everyone. If they are, one suspects the relationship to be lacking or missing some balance or grace, just as one would, in a way, pity a football player who had no life or interest aside from the game.
In short, the impression I get is that the explanatory power and majesty of the “game theory” aspects of human behaviour - the “red pill” in Matrix-speak - has both enlightened you in some ways, and blinded you in others. I readily believe that you know the “rules” and can play the “game” well (in my terms, that you are full of confidence and good at flirting); but this accomplishment is not the be-all and end-all of human relationships. There is more besides.
Hey no prob; as I said, I have nothing against you, or your goals. I just think they are sorta self-limited.
haha well it’s not one theory. It’s a TON of them combined. It’s sort of like how “learning sales” isn’t just one thing, it’s learning how to read your customers, build a connection with them, present a price to them that they’ll pay for your product, etc. But we all still just lump it under “sales”.
That’s why you don’t just learn the “outer game” techniques, you learn “inner game” too. You learn that it’s important to be well-rounded and not just a pick-up machine. You learn that as a human being you should have goals and such that aren’t related to pick-up at all. For instance right now I’m focused on the business side of my life. Pick-up is fun, and I can do it instinctively now, but I’m not constantly out on the football field wondering why everyone went home for the night. I’m off watching the sunset, having philosophical discussions, etc. doing my own thing. And I’m doing it because it’s important to me, not because it’ll help me get laid. If I have success in my business, it’s not even something I’d even bother telling girls about to try to get laid with because I’m not doing it for them.
But even within that you can break things down. Why does the football guy want to watch the sunset to relax? Is it free will? Or is it because if you went through his life you may find he’d seen a bunch of reference experiences in movies, his peers, etc. where sunsets = relaxation and so now it really DOES relax him, but it’s something that you could break down if you knew him from birth. What if someone else doesn’t find the sunset relaxing? What’s going on there? Doesn’t sunset = relax? Well, if you look at that person’s life, you may find that his dog died one morning and he subconsciously remembers seeing a sunset out the window during that traumatic emotional moment so when he sees a sunset he instinctively gets uneasy.
But both of those people would attribute their sunset-related feelings to “I dunno, I just like/dislike sunsets man…” The scary truth is we may be way more predictable in all aspects of our life than we like to think. I acknowledge this stimulus-influence within my own self too, I’m not any more immune to it than anyone else is. If I listen to sad music or watch a sad movie, I get sad/depressed for a while afterward. If I listen to happy music or watch a comedy, I get happy/cheerful for a while afterward. I’m just conscious of these things.
That’s why you learn to read people. You don’t just learn “say this and you get this response”. You learn “say this, and this type of person will respond like this, and this other type of person will respond like that, and here are the reasons they’ll respond that way and things to look for for reading which type of person they are”. This is the calibration aspect of learning pick-up, but it’s the same calibration aspect that exists in sales, being a teacher, being a bartender, being a cop, basically any situation where you’re interacting with large groups of different people.
Like I say, it’s no longer my whole life, but for a few years it was, because I like to throw myself into things heavily, I’m not much of a dabbler. For a few years I was absolutely the sad football guy who’s whole life revolves around it. But as I came out the other side of learning game, now I don’t need to go out on the football field as much and I can spend my time doing other things…but if a football play goes down around me, whether it’s on a football field or some kids on the street tossing the ol’ pigskin around, instinctively I see the red pill stuff. It’s going to be that way forever. You can’t un-learn the way chess pieces move once someone teaches you.
If some of the people in that thread had learned some game concepts so that they understood "my wife will slowly try to make me beta, and if I go from being the charming unpredictable outgoing socially adept alpha guy she fell in love with to a “yes, dear, whatever you say dear” routine-tuesday-night-missionary-sex beta guy who begs to be allowed to hang out with the two friends I have left…she’s going to totally understandably lose attraction for me…well, maybe that thread wouldn’t be so depressing to read.
But instead of acknowledging that attraction is predictable that way, we stumble around blindly and are shocked when it ends in divorce, depression, cheating, etc. There are posters in that thread that I can tell you, from their posts alone, would cheat if put in a certain situation with certain stimuli, and each of them would require slightly different circumstances for it based on where they’re at in their relationship, their history, their views on monogamy, their experience in social interactions growing up, their religion, their love of Disney movies, etc. but even they don’t know they would cheat. If I met them in person, it would be ridiculously easy to sum that all up quickly just based on my experience meeting a phenominal amount of different types of people.
So is being a bull in a china shop really a better way to approach relationships than learning how attraction works? That probably comes down to the individual, but I know that I won’t be writing in threads on message boards complaining about how unsatisfied I am with my sex life down the road.
Agreed. Like I say, there were a few years where I was absolutely lame and pity-worthy. I was getting laid, but like, I COULDN’T relax if my buddies and I went out to a bar and there weren’t girls there and they wanted to sit around drinking a jug of beer. I’d get antsy and frustrated and be like “c’mon let’s go somewhere GOOD guys, jeeze, this sucks!!” and it actually made me difficult to hang out with at times. But I was onto something new and exciting so for me that was something I wanted to focus every spare minute on. Now I’ve been there, done that, so for me it’s still cool shit, but other things in my life are way more important.
The end result is that now I’m the same guy I was way back before I started pick-up: I sit on the computer doing my nerdy things all day, I work towards business goals I want to achieve, I try to hit the gym regularly, I go out for a jug of beer in a bar with no girls in it with my friends and have a fun time shooting the shit…but under it all I have 100% complete confidence that I will NEVER have to worry about getting laid or getting a girlfriend/wife ever again. I will never have to fear that I might die alone. That part of my life is completely taken care of now, when it was something I couldn’t even conceive of before I learned game.
This. In more general terms, an “alpha male” takes a more deliberate and proactive roll in his environment. He makes decisions and takes steps to affect the outcome of events.
“I’m going to ask that girl out” not “I hope she likes me”.
“I’m going to talk with my boss about my career goals” not “I hope I get that raise”.
“This guy is going to get punched if he doesn’t cut the shit” not “stop picking on me”.
“I’m going to throw a party and invite everyone I know” not “I’m bored”.
“I have a suggestion” not “what do you want to do?”
Get the idea?
The beta male goes around hoping if he can flatter and faun over well enough, things will go his way. Of course they don’t, because his only value is as a synchophant. People will use him for his ability to please and pander until he is of no more use, and then he will be discarded.
Well, statistically, tall men do have more kids. Tall rich and handsome men are a part of that subset. But I do not at all say that this is a guarantee for every man: I do say that your odds are better if you are TRH. Cursory study - there are more.
A TRH can fuck up his situation in any number of ways. A man can always learn how to overcome the TRH advantage. Same with women - they can raise their SMV while a supermodel can scare guys away with her stupidity. But the odds are in the TRH’s favor - it’s his game to screw up.
Would you say that TRH’s are less successful with women than average Joes, or more? Or that TRH’s have lower or higher “accident forgiveness” rates than average Joes?
Nah. Never thought that. If anything I said even implied this then consider this to be clarification.
I agree, numbers don’t mean anything to me.
Would that be because he is afraid of rape charges down the line?
As a father of three young girls (one adopted) if I ever hear of some guy pushing past “we shouldn’t be doing this” I’m gonna be kicking his ass first and turning myself in to the cops later if they want me downtown for it. ESPECIALLY if the woman in question one day turns out to be one of my daughters. I am in plenty of enough company of other fathers who feel the same way that I’m fairly confident that I’m not an outlier here.
Of course a totally incompetent TRH is doomed. But that’s true of anyone. A TRH only has to be marginally competent with women to come out ahead: remember a lot more of their fuckups get forgiven. Against a PUA or someone who has good instincts (see below), a moderately skilled TRH is doomed. I know that; that’s old hat knowledge to me. But I was comparing TRH’s to average Joes - and while I know there are many ways to beat a TRH (which is all that really matters in the end), I do not see evidence that the average Joe tends to outshine a TRH, from first impressions to the point of getting laid.
True, a man cannot ever change his height but that does not invalidate the idea of getting past that limitation in other ways. Women with a “SMV of 3” can get around that in other ways.
He has something better than game - he has good instincts.
As important as humor is its delivery. Yeah, I know that.
Logical brain or instinctual/animal brain? I’m convinced it’s the latter. Especially women who say “I will absolutely not date shorter men”.
I’ve always been the type to encourage self-improvement. Hell I’m downright biased toward PUAs because I understand where they’re coming from. You gotta be competitive out there.
They need shows like that for men. I was pissed that they took that Pickup Artist show off the air. But it’s all part of society’s demand that men know their place and not try to move up the value chain. Because doing so is automatically being dishonest and dishonest men are teh once and future boogeyman.
So basically my point was that some men come with inherent advantages while others come with disadvantages from the start, some of which aren’t their fault but rather due to genetics. Also, that both men and women alike can improve their sexual market value and women who are a 3 are not doomed to be a 3 or less, forever.
Now let me try to summarize your responses here:
you are saying that advantages (such as TRH) are not absolute or permanent, and that they can be nullified; and
limitations are utterly irrelevant when you acquire mastery of the game, or if you have good instincts (as shown by your 4’3" friend, the likes of which I have seen often enough).
If this is the case I agree wholeheartedly. Especially #2, which is the most important fact of all.
I suspect you are probably a relatively young guy. What a lot of men seem to call “my wife will slowly try to make me beta” is more often than not “my wife wants me to stop acting like a college sophomore and grow up.” Your friends are not going to want to hang out at the bars every other night as you get older. Their work, marriage and kids will eat into that. Plus you don’t want to be the 50 year old guy at the bar still hitting on girls half your age.
But to your point, I do see a lot of marriages where one or both parties act like they crossed the goal line and don’t have to put any more effort into the second half of the game. Or they got married with really no intention of changing from “alpha male single guy mode” to “now I’m part of a team married mode”. With predictable results in both cases.
“This place is dead anyway”
Classic sign of addictive personality. And in my 20s, I would see this in plenty of guys I’d hang around with. If there weren’t girls around or they weren’t the center of attention or if they plain ole struck out, they would mope and gripe the whole night. Part of the problem with hanging out with PUA type guys. They can’t just hang out. They always need to be on with their stupid PUA shtick.
Point taken - although a woman, once she’s gotten him in bed, can proceed to radically increase her SMV on a permanent basis in… other ways…
True, I wasn’t trying to move this discussion from “women can never improve their SMV” to “all women can always improve it”. I was merely pushing the needle toward the center, where the truth is (in this case).
Of course I wasn’t trying to contradict the point point that personality trumps looks and wealth. But when you’re up against looks and wealth you better hope that they’ve got some incompetence or you’ve got a personality advantage, or a combo of the two. Or you can also hope that you run into a woman who is jaded against TRH - that is also a possibility.
No women, or few women?
NOT a situation I’d be envious of.
That last part isn’t necessarily true. Unless she looks like Susan Boyle (basically a 1) there are guys who will go for her. Not a lot, but some.
It may take longer for a woman to increase her appeal, I can concede that, but you said it was impossible in all cases, which it clearly isn’t.
Yes, men look better to women as they age. Harrison Ford being a not so uncommon example.
That implies a level of maturity that is rare on any forum.
Exactly. And pick-up basically teaches you “these are the behaviors of an alpha male. Don’t be afraid to make decisions and take a proactive role in your environment. It is OKAY to do that even though you were brought up and socially conditioned to never step on anyone’s toes. These behaviors are why that asshole jock got the girl that you were pining after for 3 years but never actually asked out, it’s explainable, logical, and you can duplicate the good things about his behavior (confidence, assertiveness, etc.) while leaving behind the bad things (leaving her feeling used, etc.).”
It teaches that through a very long process because if you’re 25 you’re unwiring 25 years of social conditioning and that’s not an easy task, but that’s the core of the alpha male/beta male concept.
We call this being a “value-seeker” or “taking value”. You want to be a “value-giver” or “provide value”. In the beta’s mind, he’s hoping other people will let him join their party. In the alpha’s mind, he’s inviting other people to join his party. This “what place is this action coming from” concept is a very importance difference.
This is why most of the hot girls at bars go through a stage where they have “orbiter” guys they don’t sleep with but who buy them things, drive them places, do them favors, even pay to fly the girl off on vacations (some of the stories of things guys do for girls as orbiters would blow most people’s minds)…and that girl will drive me around in the car her beta male provider bought her, wear the earrings he bought her to impress me, sleep with me when she’s here on that paid-for vacation, get the guy to drop her off at my place, etc.
And when you look at the behavior of the beta guy and his total admant resolve that he’s doing these things just because he likes doing nice things for girls (even though he’s not doing those things for the 300lb buck-toothed girl standing beside the hot one he has a secret crush on), it’s hard to feel bad for these guys. Except that I used to be one, so I understand where they’re coming from, so I do feel bad for them.
Is that because they’re tall or because the short guys are sitting at home whining about how unfair life until they become so bitter and negative that girls don’t WANT to interact with them?
If you’re defining success as “having sex with a girl”, there’s no difference. If you’re defining success as “getting initial interest from girls”, the TRH has it better.
Higher, but you have to understand it’s like the average Joe gets 1 mistake and the TRH gets 3 mistakes…but both guys make 10 mistakes in the first 5 minutes, so it becomes kind of moot.
Possibly, but it’s more because he was taught “NO MEANS NO!!!” and hasn’t quite learned (as was admitted earlier in this thread, I think by a guy talking about his ex-wife and also by a girl) that “No doesn’t ALWAYS mean no, sometimes no means keep trying!” So he gives up way sooner than she wanted him to and she loses attraction for him, and because she knows he doesn’t have the balls or sexual calibration to count on for sex, she classifies him as a beta provider or never calls him again.
What if the next day your daughter comes back home with a smile on her face and says she met the most wonderful guy and can’t wait for you to meet him and you meet him and he’s a nice guy and your daughter clearly had a blast with him during whatever they did and they end up dating and getting married and she lives a wonderful happily-ever-after life?
Again you’re visualizing the girl being thrown out by a cold callous monster as he shouts “haha don’t bother calling me you slutty whore!!” and laughs as she cries running down the hallway violated and ashamed.
The reality is the girl cuddles up to you after and goes “omg that was AWESOME” and you guys get breakfast in the morning and date for however long.
Only if you define “coming out ahead” as “talking to a girl for a few minutes and POSSIBLY going on a date that doesn’t lead to kissing, let alone sex/reproduction, and then never hearing from the girl again and being confused as to why”.
It’s like comparing “I only missed that basketball shot by 5 inches!!” to “Well I only missed it by 1 inch!!” It’s really not relevant.
No, you think it’s the instinctual brain because they say it so quickly and so adamantly. But you have to understand that behind that “I don’t date shorter men” is a lot of stuff…social pressure that the perfect couple looks like the guy taller than the girl, social pressure of feeling self-conscious about her height all her life and how a short man will emphasize her already abnormal height and cause even MORE people to stare at her than she’s already had to deal with, she may like to wear heels but have run into enough short guys with a bitter chip on their shoulder who over-compensate for being short that she’s got a bad stereotype of them in her head and just assume short guys will be insecure if she’s taller than them and she doesn’t want to babysit their low self-esteem, etc. etc.
These are all logical things, so her logical brain goes “No WAY!!!” But her instinctual/animal brain is turned on by confidence, friendly teasing, chasing a challenge, chasing a guy that other women want, chasing an alpha male who leads a group of men, a sense of humor, unpredictability, high self-esteem, etc. So when a short guy exhibits those traits, she’s attracted.
This is why one of the first things the community teaches is NEVER listen to women when it comes to advice on attracting women. VERY few of them are self-aware enough to comprehend the cognitive dissonance going on because that girl I just described above, after fucking a short guy, if asked if she’d fuck a short guy, will instantly go “No way, I’d never date a short guy!!”
There’s a LOT of first-hand, second-hand, third-hand, etc. field experience behind this, I’m not just quoting “that SOUNDS logical!” theory here.
I can agree with this. I would just add Borzo’s point that it’s much easier for a man to improve his sexual market value than a woman, and add your point that society is much more accepting/encouraging of women raising their value than men.
…now wtf do we talk about? haha
I get what you’re saying, but the alpha/beta thing is more “My wife wants me to stop talking to any female friends I have. My wife wants me to stay at home and cuddle instead of working late so we can make that mortgage payment. My wife wants to change jobs so I’m going to give up medical school or my dreams of becoming a professional engineer at this firm I’ve dreamt of working at, and follow her to wherever she wants. My wife wants me to stop hanging out with Jake because he’s “rude” and I’ve been friends with Jake since we were kids and he’s a really good friend but I don’t want her to withhold sex again tonight so sorry Jake you’re out. I don’t want to buy this house because we realistically can’t afford it but she wants it so I guess we can go into debt for it. My wife doesn’t want to have sex tonight so I guess I’ll just spank it to porn and hope maybe tomorrow she’ll feel up to it.”
When the two of them first met, she was probably attracted to the fact that he got along with women so he had a soft feminine side to him and girls trusted him, she was probably attracted to his dedicated work ethic and sense of responsibility, and to his determination to follow his dreams and career path in life, and that he would tell her “No honey, that’s ridiculous, we’re not doing that.” when she tried to get him to do something silly, and that he’d seduce her when she wasn’t “in the mood”, etc. etc.
This is actually just a really long-term form of shit-testing…she’s subconsciously seeing if he’s still the guy she fell in love with. If that guy had stayed the alpha guy she was originally attracted to and said “Look honey, Jake is my friend. He doesn’t have to come over here to the house, but I’m not cutting him out of my life, that’s ridiculous.” and “Dear, this is a gorgeous house, but our finances won’t allow for it and I don’t want us to be in debt over this because if we’re going to have kids I want us to be financially capable of taking care of them properly.”, etc. his marriage would be VERY different.
Agreed. I’m not ready to settle down into team mode yet, so I don’t promise monogamy or get married. But I’m very self-aware and I know I have a few more years of being immature and silly before I’m ready to commit to someone. But when I do eventually have a family and picking the kids up from soccer replaces hitting the pub for a pint, I’ll still retain the alpha traits that attracted my girl to me in the first place because I consciously know that if I don’t, she will naturally lose attraction for me because I’m no longer the guy I was at the start of our relationship.
haha ya, my natural buddy is as bad as a PUA in that restless stage. He has massive massive highs, as long as everythings going good and he’s getting laid, but if he goes a week without laying a new girl he gets all massive massive depressed haha I’m not real proud of the “annoying to hang out with PUA” stage I went through, it’s embarrassing to look back on, but it was necessary to cross the line to learn “oh, okay, it’s kind of silly to focus THIS much on something” and end up where I am now.
Correct that with “I’ve got ideas on how to improve the business” or better yet, “I’m going to start my own business” instead of “I’m going to talk with my boss…” and that’s a real alpha male. Alpha males don’t talk to the boss - in consistency with your opening paragraph, the alpha male takes steps to becoming the boss.
“I’m going to talk with my boss about my career goals” is beta male behavior because you’re still resigned to letting some top dog control your fate. If the boss says fuck off, the beta male accepts this, but the alpha male, before he has even talked to the boss, has already started running plans in his head to start his own business… and maybe even run his boss out of the game. That’s alpha behavior.
“I hope I get that raise” isn’t even beta male. It’s, like, delta or gamma or whatever.
Okay, point taken - if they both make 10 mistakes right off the bat, it doesn’t really matter. Unless, of course, TRH is dealing with a gold digger. In which case, when I was single, I was all “better him than me”.
Now in sales, we know no doesn’t always mean no. We work around that. I was just probing you regarding where you stand on this because the point is to keep trying, not to force things. Hell you can respond to “we shouldn’t be doing this” in a number of humorous ways. You can also make love to her mind and wind up thrown on your back and taken by force by her. But you’re an expert of that move, I assume. I only knew the bare basics of mindfuck (and not the fraudulent kind) and life was “good enough” - as in I had a steady girlfriend when I wanted one. (Although many times I wanted my solitude more than a girlfriend, which led to my rock-bottom moments during the tech crash in 2000; it had nothing to do with a lack of sex and a lot to do with the kind of women I was dating.)
That is possible, and I’d be happy.
Yes, in fact, I was visualizing this scenario.
Well, then the other problem is a TRH might also get so far as to get married - and then fleeced on an epic scale.
Ah, that makes sense. It’s logical, but in an illogical sense.
I’d like to talk about WHY it’s so unacceptable for a man to raise his SMV? Or equally as important, why is it okay for a woman to complain about her dating woes, but not for a man to do the same? This is a question I find no one is willing to answer with much else besides vitriol and downright rage. It’s a consistency hole that is downright magnetic to me - I must find the answers, precisely because the world wants to avoid this subject.
Ya, there’s a whole section of pick-up dedicated to dealing with a girl’s ASD (Anti-Slut Defense) and LMR (Last Minute Resistance), which is ultimately learning to read the difference between a “No means No” and a “No means keep trying” (LMR), and ensuring that she feels good about the whole experience instead of feeling shameful and dirty about having sex (ASD).
And dealing with ASD sounds controversial, but it isn’t about brainwashing her into believing she had fun, it’s about knowing to wait until you’re both alone to try to kiss her instead of trying to do it in front of her friends where she’ll be judged as a slut, and knowing to re-enforce that you’re into her and actually want to see her again instead of forgetting to mention that and she feels like you just wanted a one night stand, and knowing not to talk about banging her to your buddies or post the naked pics you took of her on your Facebook wall even as a joke, etc. etc.
I actually dig having my alone time. I’ve found a pretty cool chick, so I’m giving the relationship thing a go, but for a few years having only fuckbuddies was a very convenient sex life for me. I didn’t have any responsibilities so I could go meet up with a girl for a first date and if she didn’t put out that night, afterward I could txt up a fuckbuddy and have her come over to fool around. And if I wanted to I could take a month to do stuff on my own or pick up suddenly and travel, and not have to worry about accounting for where I am or explaining to a girlfriend that nothing’s wrong.
That lifestyle isn’t for everyone and I probably won’t want it down the road, and right now I’m enjoying having a primary girlfriend that I’m into and random girls here and there on the side because she’s a cool chick and the stability of a relationship and regular sex is convenient for me.
Pick-up gives you the ability to shape your sex life into what you want it to be.
Happens all the time! There are some scary horror stories out there!
That’s the female mind, haha Logical, but in an illogical sense.
That’s the funny part that some guys have trouble with…girls actually make a LOT of sense. But they don’t make sense in the way that guys make sense. They have a completely different sense of reality than guys that, to a guy can seem extremely confusing and insane (PMS, women’s intuition, a woman’s perogative to change her mind whenever she wants, logical VS emotional responses, not saying what they mean and getting mad at you for not figuring it out, complaining without wanting a solution, shit-testing guys they’re attracted to, etc. etc.)…
But when you understand the reasons they do these things, you realize they make absolute complete sense AND you wouldn’t want them to BE any other way. Like you come to appreciate these things about them. That’s why a guy who first gets into the game may get into it with bitter anger and hostility toward women (the way a kid who’s been bullied at school joins a Karate class to kick the bully’s ass), but as you get further into the game and learn to understand women you just “get” them and that bitter anger and hostility goes away (the way the kid learns Karate and gets a bit of a zen thing going and lets all that go with the bully).
A PUA first learning the game gets pissed that a girl txts him “Who’s this?” when he txts her after meeting her last night. A PUA down the road thinks “haha pretending not to remember me, eh? that’s cute :)”
That’s why I say, I really DO love women. There’s no misogyny at all. I appreciate them for the complex but wonderful creatures they are.
I would suggest that current society still has a bit of a throwback to the 1940s where “men knew how to be men”, so everyone just kind of expects a guy to know HOW to be a man, and if he doesn’t then he’s inadequate. But our culture raises us to not argue, not fight, not disagree, not cause a scene, not take something without asking, not hit the bully back, not say our opinion incase it offends someone, not be too forward with a girl, not keep score in gym class sports, lots of kids don’t even have a dad, etc. etc.
…so when do we learn those “manly” attributes we’re supposed to have?
Then throw in all the conflicting messages…“Be forward, but not TOO forward. Be persistant, but not TOO persistant. Push through her saying no, but don’t push through her saying no. Buy her flowers it’ll show you like her, don’t buy her flowers she’ll get creeped out. Be a gentleman, don’t be a pushover. Be a nice guy, be a bad boy. Get a good job, but my buddy working at Burger King gets laid. Get a 6-pack, but my chubby buddy gets laid.”
It’s really difficult for a guy to figure out what he’s supposed to BE, in terms of attracting women.
I think we’re more lenient on women because a woman has a very clearly laid out path for her: “Have nice tits.” So when a girl wants to get attention her friends dig out a push-up bra and get her to show the twins off. You can take a girl who has no idea how to be attractive and set her on a very clear path of “get your makeup done, get your hair done, get your nails done, buy a bra that makes your boobs look like this, wear a corset that hides your fat like that, wear heels that make your legs look like this” etc. etc.
Whereas for a guy who doesn’t know how to be attractive it’s like “shit man…Just be yourself? I dunno, some guys have it, some don’t I guess. Good luck!!”
Pick-up is just going “Okay, women’s sexual market value is in their looks, so they have established a path they can all attempt to follow to raise that SMV. But guys don’t have that path yet, so we’re figuring it out and coming up with a path that we can point unattractive guys to and say “this stuff is what your SMV is based on, so follow this path and you will raise your SMV”.”
Essentially it’s giving both genders a tailor-made path to being attractive (based on Western society’s current standards of what the majority considers attractive).
Wow, I’ve heard my PUA employee talk about that, but at first it went by as “wonk wonk wonk wonk” He talks about this a lot when it comes to dealing with objections in sales. Maybe I zoned out because it kept triggering the “if some bastard pulled that on my daughter” response. I admit I have a hard time getting over that response, but from talking to you I have a better idea that it’s not always a creep move. That said, it is controversial for a reason - in the wrong hands the outcome is utterly disastrous.
Now that’s refreshing to hear. Am I to interpret this as you guys advise each other NOT to talk to others about who you have sex with? I just wanted to be totally clear on this because this raises my respect for your side of the PUA community by about 200%.
Man, you almost make me miss that. Almost. Tell ya what… do not get married until you know someone can remind you of this and you can see yourself forgetting its appeal.
Jeez. There you go again, reading the Torah out loud in the Grand Mosque!
Know where she’s coming from and you can tell where she’s going. For instance I assume that a woman is hypergamic and play the game along those lines to satisfy her hypergamic urges (not with wealth, but rather with presence) and I shall not usually go wrong. For me it was a pretty simple equation until I burned out on these types of women and hit my romantic rock bottom point in life when I realized I was sacrificing myself for the kind of women I never really wanted but figured was the only kind in the world.
Maybe, maybe not. For instance, if I had learned PUA at your level as a teenager then I would have been able to ignore the hypergamic / subtle shit-testing game-playing women. I would have met women who were up front, more self-aware and less wildly fickle, while also being quite sensual in a womanly way. Of course since these women are as rare as a Painite gem. Literally. My wife is so incredibly rare that she approached me first. But I had to wait until I was in my 30s to meet someone like that. If I had learned PUA when I was younger I could have.. erm… well then I might not be married to my wife, either… hmmmm. Nevermind.
More importantly, when do we start pursuing TRUE rugged individualism by giving men the right to decide for themselves what it is to be manly?
If you tried to define for a woman what “feminine” is, you’d face some serious backlash. The same ought to be true for those hiveminders who try to define “manly”.
When you start asking yourself what you’re supposed to be, in terms of attracting women, you have already lost - at least in my opinion you have.
haha PUAs get used to that. The first thing we do when we find this stuff out is want to shout about it from the rooftops to anyone who’ll listen, especially our buddies who suck as much with women as we do, but it’s just “wonk wonk wonk wonk” to everyone else. I don’t actually talk about pickup in real life anymore unless someone specifically asks me for help/advice, and even then I’ll talk about it in really vague terms instead of getting into specific community lingo. I’ll say “She just doesn’t want to look like a slut, just grab her number for now.” vs “Her friends being around will trigger her ASD so she’ll put up more LMR and you’ll have to do a freezout, wait for 10 minutes, then re-escalate which is a pain in the ass and won’t get you an f-close, so just go for the #-close and build rapport with slow game.”
Oh, absolutely. You could use it to completely fuck with a girl’s mind. But that comes back to the “is the knife a deadly weapon or used to make a sandwich” and “the Karate guy hopefully learns not to use his ninja kicks to bully people around” stuff.
A lot of guys who get into pick-up ARE nice guys who are just fed up with not understanding how the game works, so a lot of them don’t WANT to mind-fuck a girl into sex, they want her to WANT to have sex with them. It’s not about the act of getting laid itself, a hooker would be much faster and cheaper and guaranteed…it’s about learning to be more attractive so women CHOOSE you.
Yes and no. We’re VERY descriptive about what we do, to eachother, but we never name names. There was one incident early in the community where a guy named his city and named the place the girl he picked up worked at and described her, all totally in the name of setting the scene and totally oblivious to the possible consequences of doing that. Lo and behold, some other dude in his city went to that place to find that chick and it did a lot of damage to the trust level in the scene. From then on people have been pretty strict about not giving out details. If a guy posts pics of girls, often people will say “Dude, take that down, that’s not cool, that’s violating her shit” and make him take it down. Privacy is very important and respected with this stuff.
But we definately share information. Most PUA messageboards have a “Field Reports” section where PUAs post threads where the Subject line starts with:
OR: Outing Report, just a plain night out, might not even have chatted with girls, might just be observing people/behavior, etc.
FR: Field Report, just means the guy went out and had some interesting interactions, probably got a phone number
FR++: Field Report, but it involved a kiss close, some fingering, a blowjob, etc. basically short of actual sex
LR: Lay Report, the guy got laid (not necessarily a Same Night Lay or One Night Stand, could be getting laid by a girl he’s gamed before)
LR++: Crazy shit…threesomes, orgies, multiple girls in one night, etc.
FU: Fuck Up, haha this is when a guy fucks up BIGTIME
These reports will detail things all the way from getting ready for the night, to approaching, to escalating, to leading the girl home, to how the guy dealt with ASD/LMR, to what happened the morning after. There’ll be conversation snippets, body language analysis, explanations of what was going through the guy’s head at various points and why he said or did certain things, where shit went off track, how and if he recovered, etc.
But despite all that there are NEVER names. A lot of PUAs won’t even list what city they’re from. Some of them will list the city and occasionally the bar they were at (like “The place was dead so we bounced over to DrinkLand to see what was up!”), but that’s about it. Girls are always given nicknames, generally starting with HB (“Hot Babe”). So if I met a girl with glasses, she’d become HBGlasses, or if I met a girl who gave me shit as soon as I said Hello, she’d become HBAttitude.
Some guys will include numbers to reference the girl’s generall level of hotness, like HB9Tanned. The 1 - 10 scale is pretty subjective, but the rating tends to be a combination of how the guy sees the girl, how other people see the girl, and how the girl sees herself. So if the report involves an HB6, whoever’s reading it can kind of classify that girl as “probably not going to be super confident” and the context of the report is easier to follow…whereas if the report invovles an HB10, it’ll probably contain things that you wouldn’t say to an HB6 but reading the report you understand “okay this works on an HB10 who knows she’s an HB10, but I wouldn’t say this to an HB6!”
Field reports are the reason the PUA community deconstructed social interactions so fast. You have the combined social interactions and analyses of thousands of PUAs, having thousands of interactions, over years and years, and all helping eachother deconstruct their interactions, fix problems and re-occurring sticking points, give advice, theorize possible solutions, test out new material, routines, concepts, etc.
I think people underestimate how much combined energy has been put into this, which is why they dismiss a lot of these things as “whatever, that doesn’t make sense…trust me, I believe THIS is how things REALLY work!” It’s like, shit, it’s cool that you have an opinion and all, but mine is based on a massive global collection of tons and tons of tried and tested data and yours is based on maybe 10 experiences in your personal life, you know?
haha I always say when I find a girl who makes me NOT want to look at other girls and NOT care about having free time, I’ll settle down with her.
Ya, you’re pretty much setting yourself up for a string of shitty low-quality women with that mentality. You’re essentially “slumming it” by default. When I started, I’d tap anything that moved because this whole concept of actually being able to have sex with girls was new and amazing to me. But now I’m verrrrry very picky with girls. I’ve learned that I don’t like low self-esteem girls and that the vast majority of people (guys and girls) are low self-esteem to various degrees. I also don’t like shy quiet girls, or girls who don’t have their own social life or career, etc. So when I run into girls like that, I’m not as interested as I would have been a few years ago.
I don’t judge them for not having their shit together, there are guys out there who will like them despite that, but I just know for me, personally, to be happy, there’s a certain mental checklist in my head that a girl has to meet. For a fling, it’s not as important, but to actually settle down with a girl she would have to be nearly perfect. I deserve that and there are billions of women out there, I’m sure I’ll find her eventually. In the meantime, the search is a blast.
I’ve wondered how I would have turned out if I hadn’t gotten into pickup. I’m sure I would have been happy, or at least not miserable. I probably would’ve gotten approached by some girl and settle down with her out of being scared she might be my only chance for a relationship. And if she was a good quality girl, then I’m sure I’d have lived out a pretty normal life. But god, the things I’ve done, the shit I’ve seen, the stories I have that other guys can’t even wrap their heads around…I wouldn’t trade it for a normal life for even a microsecond haha
This is actually a relevant concept in pickup. When you start out, you’re taught “everything I’ve been doing up till now hasn’t worked, so I have to change myself entirely.” and you hide all the “uncool/unmanly” things about yourself. You tell girls you have a cooler job than you really do, you buy some expensive clothes so girls will think you have more money than you do, you keep your World of Warcraft habit and your comic book collection a secret and hide the comics under your bed because god forbid a girl should see them, she’d obviously go running out the door!! You’re told “this is what a man is, this is what women want.”
Then down the road when you’ve studied pickup for a long time, you realize that most of it is internal, and you start to understand a big community catch-phrase that goes: What you feel, she feels. So if you’re ashamed of your comic book collection, she’ll think it’s lame. If you think your comic book collection is the awesomest thing ever, she’ll think it’s cool.
I remember learning this myself when I used to tell girls where I was from. They’d ask “Where are you from?” and I’d go “(shrug) …BlahPlace…I know, it’s kind of lame hey.” and, naturally, they’d think it was lame. So then one day I told myself “Okay tonight I’m going to try using enthusiasm.” so instead I’d reply “I’m from BlahPlace! It’s AWESOME, have you ever been there? Oh you’d love it, it’s gorgeous out there.” and bam, every chick would think it was the coolest shit.
So now I’ve come full circle back to where I started. I’m a nerd, but I’m not ashamed of it, and because I’m not ashamed of it, girls think my nerdiness is cool. It took a long time to fully accept that really simple concept, which is actually the generic “Just be yourself man!” advice everyone gives socially akward guys haha It’s just until you actually try this stuff out, you don’t really understand what that “Just be yourself man!” advice actually meant and often the people giving that advice weren’t aware of what it actually meant either or were unable to articulate it to you in a useful way.
Just to follow this up: use my last example. If I tell you right now that the next time someone asks “where are you from?” if you respond with “cityname… :(” you will get a pity vibe from the person. If you respond with “cityname!! It’s awesome, have you ever been there? It’s gorgeous!” you will get a positive response.
Now you can agree to test this concept out. But when would you do that? A couple weeks from now when you get a night out with your buddies? Except wait, they know where you’re from so it’ll be the next time you talk to a stranger and the conversation happens to turn to where you’re from. That might happen this month once.
Whereas I will go out Friday and Saturday and start 10 conversations each night and as soon a possible I’ll work in a routine I’m making up off the top of my head right now that will go:
Me: “are you from around here? Born and raised?”
Her: (anything)
Me: “oh cool, I’ve found everyone here SO friendly compared to back home!”
Her: (inevitably) “oh? Where are you from?”
And that will work exactly like that in all 10 conversations. Friday’s 10 I’ll respond with the response and Saturday’s 10 I’ll respond with the response. In a month I’ll have 80 samples of data to your 1. But then on top of it I’ll post the concept on a PUA forum and 100 PUAs will go out and try the same experiment. Now we have 8000 samples of data in a month to your 1. Then it’ll become community knowledge and over a year that 8000 will become over 50,000 samples.
It’s been a fascinating read so far, I have to say. Leaving aside the vaguely discomforting vibe I’m getting from the whole thing, I have to wonder if the various “Pick Up” techniques are equally effective in places besides the US? I mean, take something like this:
Firstly, why would you get a (serious) “pity” vibe for saying “I’m from London/Melbourne/Vancouver/Other 1st World City”? Secondly, I’m not female, but I’m pretty sure that “getting excited” about the city you’re from is going to be… off-putting in some way. It’s just not something people usually do IME.
Heh, this reminds me very much of my relationship to making money in my 20s.
I too hit “bottom” in that respect - in terms of total poverty - and I looked around at all my friends, who mostly conformed to the “smoke pot in their mom’s basements, work at shit jobs, spend time discussing that band they were going to form” stereotype - and knew, with a great feeling of self-revulsion, that I didn’t want to end up like that but was in serious danger of doing so. I was working (for peanuts) in the family sculpture business, making ceramic elephants, and living with mom. I could see no future in this, other than humiliating dependency.
So I threw myself into making money - I went to law school (I had excellent marks in undergrad - in anthropology! Now there’s a useful program! But in Canada, you could use those to apply for law school, together with LSAT), and when I graduated, I was earning more money than I ever dreamed of before.
Suddenly, to me money was “the answer”. Having money the greatest thing ever. I was absurdly pleased with myself, and no doubt, the most obnoxious yuppie ever, all the worse for having been a druggie, arty nerd without two cents to rub together.
Better, money and its use was “the secret”. People talk of conspiracy theories and the like, but I knew the truth - the only real conspiracy was the flow of money and power (same thing mostly), and if you knew enough, it wasn’t secret!
Took me a while to recover from that, to realize that money was something it was bad not to have, but alone did not make one any better than before; that understanding money and its flow was a necessary but not sufficient criterion for personal success and self-knowledge.
Really, the best explaination is the hierachy of needs:
“Game” theory addresses both the “belonging” and “esteem” levels; making lots of money addresses the “esteem” level. But that is not all there is.
Being blocked in self-esteem and self-confidence is crippling (and I take it that all this talk of “alpha” and “beta” males is basically about that - alpha males have self-confidence and self-esteem, and beta males don’t). However, being brim-full of confidence and self-esteem isn’t enough to be fully happy, in relationship or in life. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
It seems like you realize that - which is great - but the danger I foresee in the “game” theory is that it can easily blind people to all else, to the point where chasing self-esteem becomes the goal in and of itself. That isn’t a pretty sight.
If I’ve been following this, it’s not where you’re from, it’s what you project about it. If you act like you came from the lamest place in Christendom then that’s how you’ll get received even if you see the sun rise over Cristo Redentor out of your bedroom window every single day.
response and Saturday’s 10 I’ll respond with the