Archive for July, 2011

Date Selection as Lifestyle Selling

Monday, July 11th, 2011

I have been apartment hunting lately, just looking to fill an empty room in someone else’s apartment rather than either rent one myself or put together a group of friends and find a place together. It has always been my experience that roommates work better when your lives are separate. In any case, Craigslist rooms are at a premium here in Manhattan, and so I quickly realized how important it is to sell yourself properly when you go to “look at the apartment.” Of course, the first thing that came to mind was pickup.

In the process of apartment hunting, I found it important to lead with my deal-breakers first, so that I don’t waste my time.  I have a few of these: I need to be able to smoke weed, at least in my room; I need to be able to cook at least a few times a week; I need to be able to bring girls back to my room without consideration of other roommates; I need to be able to fit a queen size bed in the room; I need to be in a certain location to make pulling easiest. This is an important lesson for dating too, particularly as it relates to online dating, though it’s talked about in the community pretty extensively. Don’t try to be everything to everyone, figure out what you want, and work toward designing your game to attract that type of person.

In talking with the people, since the competition is so high, you really have to sell the lifestyle that you are looking for, or at least that you think they are looking for. Job stability is an important element in this, as is savings level. Also, how will having you in their life improve their life? These are the questions you need to answer, ideally before they come up. The reason that I bring this up with regards to dating is because it occurs to me that in the past, I have not done a very good job of painting a picture of what a life with me would be like. Part of this is intentional, I generally like to choose interesting things to do on dates so that we have “fun.” Of course, any way you slice it, this is coming from the wrong place. Something that I’ve started doing lately, at least with my 2nd and 3rd dates, is trying to strike a balance between being “awesome guy” and being “chill guy.” More than that, I have been intentionally designing my dates to work with each other as a means to paint a picture of what life with me would be like. Part of that is going super meta and talking about how masculinity and femininity define each other, but part of this is also toning it way down and just strolling around the park bullshitting about nothing in particular. Maybe picking up some food along the way.

To say this another way, don’t oversell yourself. The more normal you seem, at least from a lifestyle perspective, the more she will be into it. Once you have her attracted, once you have her into you, it’s all about selling the lifestyle that you two would have together, at least if you’re looking for a girlfriend. She’s not looking for a party animal for a boyfriend. She’s not looking for a guy who can pick three awesome dates that are super fun and involved. One or two of these thrown in there occasionally are good, because women do want to have “special” nights from time to time, but in general, err on the side of being normal. Always ask yourself, “what would Don Draper do?” Yesterday I basically just walked around the park all day with a girl for a second date. It went pretty long, and ended up turning into grabbing food and watching a movie, but this is just because we were having fun. In planning the date, I had planned on doing some wine drinking with some miracle fruit, which would be fun, but is also a little ridiculous and unnecessary. Along the way, I just decided that it was unnecessary and that coming prepared with a blanket to lie on would be sufficient. Miracle fruit tastings are decidedly not what Draper would do.

Another point along the lines of not overselling yourself, at least on second and later dates, is that silence is okay. In a lot of ways, the more silence you can get away with without it getting boring, the better. If you guys are going to be dating, you will be spending a lot of time together, and she needs to feel comfortable with that silence.

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Sex as a Selfish Act

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

It started with a conversation with some chick who I’d met online but had no interest in ever meeting. I said something about how if a woman agrees to go out with me on a weekend night, I expect sex, and if she isn’t ready for sex, I expect her to be “busy” when I invite her out on a Saturday. At some point she admitted to me that she had banged a guy she’d met online after the 3rd date, but that she regretted it when he didn’t call her again. She said that she regretted “giving herself to him” when it didn’t work out.

Sex is an inherently selfish act. When you first state this to people, they consider it to be either totally obvious or totally nonsensical. Those who call it nonsense tend to say things like “sex is more fun when it’s unselfish” or “not if you do it right” or some other totally illogical insult. Let’s make something clear, when I describe sex as “selfish,” that is not to say that getting a nut is the only thing that matters. Pleasing a partner is part of the enjoyment of the experience, as is any number of other “compromises” that people try to use as loopholes in this discussion. When I have sex, I am being equally selfish when I finish in a girl’s ass as I am when I stimulate her deep spot until she’s in a multi-orgasmic state. It’s no wonder why Lance and I both value a woman’s multi-orgasmic ability as one of the most important characteristics of “good sex.”

Now that we’ve stiff armed the haters, let’s talk. Why is this idea of sex as a selfish act an epiphany? How does internalizing this singular concept mean everything?

The typical “AFC” mentality is that sex is selfish for men and unselfish for women. When a man has sex with a woman, he is taking sex from her and she is giving sex to him. In the same conversation with the above girl, she said, “the problem is that girls pretend to be prude but the reality is we are just as horny as guys but guys loose respect for girls after sex.” This is the typical mentality that we see in the dating world. This is not just semantics, this is what people actually go through life believing, in many cases from birth until death.

Imagine for a second that you let go of this belief, and imagine instead that sex is a mutually selfish act. Men love sex, women love sex, and when they have sex together, they are doing it because they both want to. They’re both horny. Does this sound like anything we’ve ever seen in the PUA community before? Does it maybe sound like the “sexual frames?” I was taught that the 5 most important sexual frames are non-judgmental, good at keeping secrets, independent, responsible, and sexually aggressive. I believe that all of these frames are derivatives of this idea of “sex as a selfish act,” which would make selfish sex THE frame. The only one that matters. I am willing to bet that if you come in with this frame and get her to accept it, everything else is just logistics.

So how do you use this do your advantage in game? If you really wanted to, you could probably just use it as an opener into a compliance loop Steve style. In a night time scenario, this would be a quick way to screen for same night lay potential, as any woman who refuses to accept the premise even if you lay it out completely is probably not going to be down with the SNL.

I prefer to use this to get deep a couple drinks into a date. “I find femininity attractive, I find a woman who embraces her sexuality attractive. I find it unattractive when a woman considers sex to be her primary/only bargaining chip in the dating marketplace. This idea that sex is a selfless gift from a woman to a man needs to go. Sex is mutually selfish in the most beautiful way possible. It is mutually selfish in the way that a relationship between an employer and employee is selfish. It is mutually selfish in the way that the relationship between a mother and a child is mutually selfish.”

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