Female Mind

Women tell you they’re “done with hookups” all the time. But when they say it, do they really mean it?

A few years back, I rode down the elevator from a business conference around 8 o’clock at night. There was a woman in the elevator car with me as I rode down, and I struck up a conversation with her. She was 39; six years my senior at the time. She was married with children, but thin and shapely, and looked good for her age.

In the lobby, she revealed she was leaving the conference. I was on my way out too, and I noticed her linger a bit after she told me. She seemed like she was waiting to see what I’d say. So I told her “Me too. I’ll walk with you,” and we left together.

She was hungry; she hadn’t eaten dinner. We headed to a diner nearby. There, she ordered food and a drink. I didn’t want to eat and only ordered a drink. And she told me about her life. The vibe grew ever more intimate, and ever more charged. We got the bill; she paid for everything. Then, as we got up to leave, she said she thought she would just head back to her nearby hotel and rest. She gestured in the direction of her hotel and told me it was this way.

So, I called it off. I bid her goodnight, and walked a different way. I’d gone along with her because I don’t spend time with women in their late 30s, or women who are married with children, and I was curious how far things would progress. I never had any intention to sleep with her though. Just to have a nice conversation.

As things progressed, and the vibe got sexier, I did get a bit tempted... everything just flowed so well. I try not to break my “no girls over 30” rule, though I thought about it here since the girl looked fine and everything flowed so smooth (I’ll set the rule aside for genuinely beautiful post-30s women who don’t look like they’re post-30s... or for attractive-enough women in their 30s who make it sufficiently easy and enticing). However, I also have a rule about not hooking up with married women I know are married, especially if I know they have children, and that is one I don’t break. So I let her go... yet it stood out to me, for one reason:

I thought women her age were supposed to be ‘done with hooking up’ and too mature for all this hookup stuff, I thought.

What is she thinking? Before you try to get inside her head, you must know this principle: taking action trumps reading minds.

We talk about female psychology a good deal on Girls Chase. At the meta level, it’s supremely helpful to know how women tick and what goes on in their heads.

However, today, we’re going to look at the granular level. The “what is this one individual girl thinking?” level. We’ll start with part of a comment by Girls Chase reader SZ:

“I was also hoping you could explain this interaction to me, I try to be a warm person, but people don’t become warm, they’re cold. I was at the gym, This girl I saw was nice to me and asked me how I was, I told her and asked her the same, I looked at her a few times while we worked out nothing too much, just to check her out, then when I was leaving I said bye to her and she had headphones in, but I felt she heard me, I waited there for a response, then she gave me this attitude way of saying bye, like she was too cool for me. It was like a look of “oh please, I’m too cool for you attitude”. It threw me off because I didn’t make it obvious I looked at her a few times, I didn’t try to ask her out, I made sure she didn’t see me look at her here and there. I was cool, so I don’t understand the coyness. I was just being a man and looking at a girl, I don’t know if she saw me check her out, so I don’t know if that was the reason she acted like that.”

So, a girl started off seemingly nice to him. Then ended up seemingly cool toward him. What happened, and what does it mean? Well...

• It could be she wanted him to flirt with her more and ask her out, he didn’t, and she was disappointed.

• It could be she was just being polite earlier, and in truth didn’t want to encourage him any more than she needed to.

• It could be she started off her workout in a sociable mood, but by the end of it she was focused on music and exercise and ‘tuned out’ socially, so just seemed cold.

Maybe it’s none of these, and it’s something else entirely.

The thing is, with an individual woman, in an individual situation, you will not know what she is thinking.

You may have guesses. And sometimes your guesses will be correct. Sometimes they’ll be wholly, completely, laughably wrong, though.

Which brings us to our primary point today: it doesn’t matter what she’s thinking right there, this very moment. Stop worrying about what she’s thinking. Get focused on results, and stop chasing after rabbits.

Some guys just don’t ‘count’ for women. They can hook up with them, date them… and yet, the guys still don’t count. Why do women do this, and how can you be a ‘doesn’t count’ guy yourself?

There was a thing I set out to do early on in my journey into seduction. I couldn’t then have put it into words. But I knew what it looked like. I wished:

• To be a guy women pined for, instead of the one doing the pining
  

• To be able to walk into a room and seduce the woman I wanted
  

• Women to expect nothing from me yet desire me just the same

• Women to be genuinely surprised if I chose to keep them as girlfriends

• To be a man the normal rules of dating did not apply to
  

There are different ways to name this. One might be to say I wanted all the power in the male-female courtship dynamic. The power to choose, seduce, and decide. And sure, you could say that was true. But that’s true of most people. Most people – men and women alike – look for ways to increase their power in the courtship dance. They want to be more liked, more loved, more adored; to better be able to pick and choose the mates they want, and captures those mates’ hearts and minds.

Another way to name what I wanted, though, was to be a guy who ‘didn’t count’.

The phrase ‘doesn’t count’ can apply to lots of things. However, the way women usually use it when talking about men they’ve had romantic involvements with is to describe men they want to erase from their histories: “He didn’t count.” “That guy didn’t count.” “Oh, Jim? He doesn’t count.”

That was the guy I wanted to be.

The one who ‘didn’t count’.

Everybody likes attention. Yet with women, attention is more than a means to an end – getting your attention is very often the end itself.

Women will tell you they want a lot of things.

But there’s one thing women want from you above and beyond all else: your attention.

They can want this attention to take various forms.

Some women want you to be smitten with them.

Some women want you to chase after them.

Some women want you to feel like you could never have them (yet pine after them regardless).

Some women want you to court them, seduce them, and make love to them.

Some women just want you to think they’re amazing.

But the one thing all women have in common is they want you to notice them, look at them, and pay them attention.

As a man, this is important for you to understand. All the women around you fight for your attention. They do it in different ways. Some tempt you; some shame you; some scold you; some befriend you; some agree with you. All seek to have you notice them, listen to them, and invest your time and energy into them.

You must understand you can control which women receive your attention... and what they must give you in exchange for it.

But just because you can control this, doesn’t mean you will. Many women are far better at extracting attention from men without giving things men value in return for it than men are at getting what they want in return.

Despite the pop culture memes, women don’t actually know you definitely want sex… unless you make it clear to them.

There’s this pervasive belief many men have that women must automatically know you want to have sex with them if you do. Women on television claim men are all about sex, or always have sex on the mind, and roll their eyes at perpetually horny males. Women you meet in real life get in on the act too; they may complain to you “guys only want sex.” And men see these things, and hear these things, and assume women must actually mean it.

There is an important realization to have about this ‘belief’, however. That realization is that it is far from an absolute belief. Any more than even a deeply woman-skeptical man who says “The only thing women want is money!” genuinely, truly, at his very core, believes “the only thing women want is money.” You know, and I know, and that guy at his core knows that every time he meets a cute girl, what he thinks is “Geez, I sure hope she likes me for me.”

Women do the same thing with “Guys only want sex.” It is the same statement as “Girls only want money.” Neither sex absolutely believes it (though the more cynical members of either sex may be strongly opinionated about it). Yet they repeat these statements nevertheless.

We won’t bother to deal with the women-only-want-money belief, since that isn’t affecting us here (and we’ve dealt with that and similar women-only-want-X beliefs in the past). For this meme’s effects on women, just look at all the women who rush to pay for their own meals in the West now; many of the women who rush to pay are women who fear being labeled with the “This chick only wants money from me” label. Today though, we’re going to put the men-sex statement under the microscope – because of the impacts it has on you, Dear Reader.

If she likes you, but opts not to hook up with you, what does it mean? Why, it means you’ve failed her Chad test – and now she’ll make you wait.

You’re back alone at your place with a girl. What you know about her: she’s adventurous, independent, and, by all indications, probably has been with her fair share of men. Perhaps she’s shared some of her old war stories with you: guys she’s been with, wild hookups she has had, sordid escapades gone by.

For some reason, it feels slightly off. You feel like she likes you, it’s just... her walls are up.

You decide to go for it anyway. She’s near you on the couch, with her body turned slightly away from yours. Her arms are folded, her expression slightly tensed. “Come here, you’re so far away,” you tell her. She scoots a little closer, but she doesn’t seem excited to do it. You put your hand on her chin to turn her face toward yours. She stops you.

“I don’t feel ready for that yet,” she says. You feel let down. After all that talk about all her crazy past hookups... and now she “isn’t ready?”

“I should probably go,” she tells you. You figure she’s blowing you off. And to be honest, you’re not really feeling it yourself either. Her defensiveness has killed any interest in her you had earlier. You walk her to the door. “I had fun,” she says. “We should hang out again soon.” You grunt a response and let her go.

Two weeks later – you haven’t bothered to message her – she texts you, asking what you’re up to and why she hasn’t heard from you. It seems so weird... this girl resisted intimacy when you brought her back, but she still wants to meet up anyway. Why? For what?

Slowly it starts to dawn on you: she likes you... just not enough to make you one of the men she gives it up too fast.

You have, in other words, failed the Chad test.

What women say they want and what they actually choose often doesn’t line up. Why is so much of what women really want unconscious?

One of the most challenging aspects of psychological science is how often people say they want one thing, only to choose something else.

I saw this routinely back in my tire salesman days. A customer would come in and say he wanted the cheapest set of tires we had. I’d ask him about what he wanted his driving experience to be like; I’d discover he wanted great road traction and a comfortable ride; and he’d proceed to purchase a premium set of tires with excellent traction and ride comfort instead.

This “what you say you want vs. what you actually want” issue manifests in all sorts of ways in psychological science, too. Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel’s 2008 speed dating study “Do people know what they initially desire in a romantic partner?” found no matter how strong someone insisted a preference was (e.g., “I will only date a girl if she is beautiful” “I won’t date a guy unless he makes a lot of money”), that person was no more likely to pick someone who matched the preference in a live event than average.

In his chapter in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, on how women evaluate mate prospects, Bruce J. Ellis unfurls a host of items on how women select their mates. One of the most important things Ellis talks about, though, is some of the paradoxes in mate selection. For instance, much research finds women are drawn to men who are socially dominant: men who dominate their social environments. These men tend to be cooler, more aloof, and more detached. Yet a lot of other research finds women are drawn to men who are warm, personal, and caring. How do those two connect?

We’ll talk about Ellis’s solutions to the warmth-dominance paradox below. But first we need to pose a question: do people actually know what they want?