Socializing

You're out and about, in a high end nightclub or a top shelf retail outlet, when you spot an insanely beautiful woman. She's just gorgeous: dressed to the nines, hair flowing and perfect, and standing atop 6 inch heels. You have to meet her.

So, you walk over, start talking to her, and, to bring her back down to Earth and rob her of the inflated status her beauty and style must, you reason, confer, you apply a well-worn tactic from the early days of the codifying of seduction: the PUA neg.

"Nice nails," you ask her, 30 seconds into the conversation. "Are they real?"

That's a neg, and that's how it looks in practice for 99.9% of the guys out there who're using it.

What I want to address with today's post is what the concept behind the neg is, whether negs actually work, and whether there are any alternatives to it.

I'll lead off by telling you this: the neg, at least the way most guys who use it these days use it, is totally not the right way to go.

I had a date Friday night with a young television anchor for one of the big TV stations in China and Hong Kong. Things started out innocently enough -- she put me in the hot seat early on, treating me almost like how I imagine she must treat her interviewees, asking me lots of questions and making it feel like an interview -- but I soon wrested control of the flow of conversation, and pretty soon things were going swimmingly. I used something known as the cold read to do it.

Before you knew it we were well into a deep dive, her telling me all about her past relationships and what she thinks the purpose of life is and what she really wants (children, namely). And it all happened, despite a little while of me being there in the hot seat, more or less effortlessly.

Even not so long ago, I struggled with transitioning into "real" conversation when I was facing women who were professional "talkers" -- reporters, saleswomen, any kind of gal who spoke effusively for a living. The problem was, women like that tend to snap into these routines of making their pitch or going into interview mode, and it can be hard to snap them out of it.

What I ended up returning to to solve this dilemma was something I've developed slowly -- almost unconsciously -- over the past half decade: cold reading.

It's largely because of cold reading that I had this girl who was so used to steering the conversation instead drinking in every moment with me, and by extension it's largely because of cold reading that I had this girl telling me how she'd drank too much (after a mere two drinks, spread across 2 1/2 hours) and all but announcing that I should invite her home to make some bad decisions.

A buddy of mine recently asked me to write on how to meet girls in groups, as it's something I don't talk about a great deal on here. The most I've touched on the topic before has been in "Breaking Circle," the post on maintaining attraction despite distractions around you or even other people trying interrupt you.

But, as my friend noted, I haven't gotten a proper treatment on meeting women in groups up yet, so this is it.

Meeting girls in groups is one of those things that, assuming you're doing much nighttime approaching, you're going to run into reasonably regularly. In fact, it may very well be the meat and potatoes of your approaches -- you might just find yourself in groups most of the time.

Groups aren't ideal, of course. Things tend to move faster and more smoothly the majority of the time when it's just you and your girl, and there are no interruptions or distractions to knock the two of you off course.

However, when handled appropriately, any negatives of groups can usually be negated, and in fact you can sometimes even get groups working for you with the women you meet. So it doesn't always have to be unfortunate that that pretty girl you like is in the middle of a group -- sometimes groups make it even easier for the two of you to get together.

When I first decided to start tackling women and dating as a skill set to methodically improve at the end of 2004, I went into it with three distinct aims:

• Be a seductive, charming bad boy,
• Constantly test the limits and push to improve, and
• Make women feel special.

I didn't know exactly what I was doing or how my learning curve would look, but I trusted that as I chipped away at learning the ability to do better with women, I would indeed get it down, as I had a diverse array of other skills.

It wasn't until a year later that I found the pick up community. Many parts of it excited me; I couldn't believe there was an entire group of men who'd worked to develop this same skill set too, some much further along than myself. But there was one part that mystified me:

These guys didn't seem to know how to make a girl feel special.

So much of their stuff revolved around spitting out scripted lines and "canned routines" at girls, which I tried, briefly, but tossed aside after only a few weeks. It didn't feel genuine at all, and it wasn't how I wanted my interactions with women to be.

They had lots of great advice, to be sure; studying the findings of these guys who'd already been down the path I'd set myself out on was immensely helpful. But in that one department -- in making girls feel special -- I was pretty sure I had something they didn't.

Unless you exclusively meet women by yourself, sooner or later you're going to have a buddy along with you when you meet a new girl or two. And what your buddy does -- and what you do -- can go a long way toward determining the outcome of that encounter.

There are, it seems, as many prescriptions out there on how to be a wingman as there are on how to become a millionaire, or how to get six-pack abs. But, you know me -- I don't tend to agree with too much of the advice that's out there. I usually find it overcomplicated and too "fancy."

Like, if you want great abs, you don't get the Super Ab Roller 3000 and start rubbing lotions on your stomach to melt away the fat. Instead, you just scale down the number of calories you're taking in and cut your carbs to drop the belly that's hiding your abs, and regularly hit the gym, go grab a bar above your head, and start lifting your knees up against your chest until your abs are on fire a couple times a week to build up your abdominals. Presto, great abs without magic machines or mysterious ointments.

Learning how to be a wingman is like that. You'll get all kinds of crazy advice out there -- some of which I'll highlight today, as examples of what not to do, before we get into what to do. But you'll be better off avoiding all that crazy advice, and instead sticking to what works.

If you're like me and you come from a background of being low attainability with girls -- teasing them a little too hard, seeming a little too aloof, causing them to clam up and get cold and snippy and dismissive -- or if you started off as a nice guy and ended up swinging to the opposite extreme, you'd probably be inclined to thinking screening and qualifying is the best thing since sliced bread. I know I sure was.

Screening and qualifying is an effective way of finding out if a girl meets your standards. If you're just starting out with women, of course, most of those "standards" are arbitrary standards you're putting up for the sake of seeming like you're being picky; but as you accumulate more success with women, you really do become a lot pickier.

So how do you find out if a girl's your kind of girl? Well, you screen her and, when she passes your screens, you qualify her. At least, that's the standard advice.

What I've realized lately though is that stand-alone screening and qualifying -- even at its acme, its highest levels -- it's still a technique best suited to beginners and early intermediates.

Why? Because, one, screening and qualifying as a stand-alone technique is clumsy. It's unnatural, and it feels contrived. And in fact, as you start getting better, there's something a lot more natural you can use in this approach's place.

If there's one pet peeve I have right now, it's the current way being an "alpha male" is talked about in most pick up and dating circles. I've gotten to the point personally where I cringe every time I hear some guy talking about "being alpha."

But I don't want to go on an anti-alpha tirade here, because at it's core, the alpha male ideology is very correct; it's just that the term itself has become so laden with cultural baggage that "the alpha male" has just about become a stereotype -- a clownish, cartoon caricature of what an alpha male used to be.

Every time I hear the term "alpha" these days, I imagine some bald, shirtless, gargantuan, vein-popping 'roid-head screaming, "Alpha... ALPHA!!!" at the top of his lungs, and a crowd of skinny nerdy guys standing around him, pointing at him in awe, and whispering to each other, "That's alpha. That's how you get the ladies."

This post is my effort to wrestle back the term "alpha male" from the shadow of itself it's become, and redefine once and for all what the term really means -- and exactly how to be an alpha male... without turning yourself into a cartoon character.