Social Life

Paying attention to others and measuring and analyzing how they react to you is a dangerous game. It can lead to all sorts of bad things – “analysis paralysis”, too much of a focus on reactions and too little of one on results, and attention-seeking and reaction-grabbing behavior to the extreme.

And yet, monitoring and learning from reactions is an utterly vital habit to get into. Without reaction analysis, most folks are doomed to low levels of social calibration for life.

A few posts ago, we took a look at dealing with disruptive men – ways to shut down and deal with men who come in and interrupt your interaction with a woman. This post is a little different than that one – this is about how you deal with being interrupted by someone who has something she wants to add to your conversation.

You’ve just met a girl, and you like her, and you’re getting to know her, and then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a man you’ve never met before in your life steps up to you and starts talking to you.

“Hey, how do you guys know each other?” he asks.

Or, “Dude, where’d you get that shirt – it looks like something I saw at a yard sale last weekend,” he remarks.

Or, “Hey, buddy – that’s my friend. She doesn’t want to talk to you.”

Disrupting, interrupting, tooling, AMOG tactics, whatever you want to call it, this can be a real thorn in your side until you figure it out. It’s quite annoying and can be out-and-out frustrating when you lose a girl because some oaf lacking in social finesse decides to offer his opinion on your conversation and manages to throw you off balance, or he distracts you from the girl long enough that she starts feeling excluded and leaves, or gets dragged off by a friend keeping an eye on the interaction.

I’ve long avoided email for having important conversations, especially any where I predict there may be even a hint of contention. I couldn’t have told you why before, just that I noticed that email conversations about sensitive topics always tended to go poorly. I’ve even lost a few good people in my life from email debates that got out of hand.

Against my better judgment, I just found myself caught up once again in a back-and-forth email debate with a good friend of mine. And once again, it quickly went from civil to cutthroat in the space of only a few emails.

Social calibration is one of the toughest things to learn, because it’s one of those things where if you haven’t yet become aware of a certain aspect of socializing, you may be completely oblivious to mistakes you’re making or people you’re offending or alienating. I want to take a look today at some common mistakes that can get a guy labeled “rude” (or worse) and what he might do about them to correct that.

It’s of great importance in socializing and seduction that you have a solid identity; this is common knowledge among us who travel in these circles. What often isn’t common knowledge is how much of an attraction-killer a bad label can be.

What’s a bad label? It’s anything that stereotypes you, pigeonholes you, or shuffles you away into a woman’s file box for, “Oh, he’s like THAT.”

I just read a fascinating article today that brings scientific research to bear on the topic of an old post I made that went on to be featured on some popular dating and seduction websites. The content still resonates and is still relevant today, and so I've reposted again here for you to see and read -- hope you enjoy.

19 December 2007