Socializing

One of the things I always look to guide men out of doing, whether I’m coaching them in-person or advising them via phone or Internet or just writing stuff for them to read, is being the entertainer. I touched on this a bit in Acting With Intent and Faux Pas of the Sociaux Nouveaux, and I really ought to write a proper post devoted mostly to this, but the problem in a nutshell with being the entertainer is that you get a lot of false positives.

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.

“Abundance Mentality” is something that’s frequently prescribed as an answer to men’s neediness issues: approach anxiety, having a “weird” or “awkward” vibe, escalation hesitation, failure to invite women home. Anything where a guy comes off as hesitant or is nervous about achieving a certain outcome.

Men who know there are women everywhere, and know they can get women whenever they want, goes the thinking, won’t worry about it.

But in fact, a standard abundance mentality will only get you halfway there.

Want a really cool, sneaky way of getting girls to wonder about you and find you more intriguing? You can use something I call a question suggestion.

A question suggestion is, in a nutshell, a way of quite deftly placing a burning question about you into a woman’s mind and making her curious about you, without much more than a subtle drop of a hint of question into your normal conversation with her.

In competitive endeavors, it’s important to maintain a stout defense. Whether discussing military operations, or man-to-man combat, or sports matches, or guarding a company’s secrets against industrial espionage, it is of vital importance to have a strong, effective defense protecting oneself from one’s opponents.

But seduction is not a military operation. Nor are relationships competitive sports matches. And a lot of guys don’t seem to get this.

Ah, questions. Those dreaded devices that seem so adept at cornering us into places we’d rather not be. How do you get out of answering the ones you don’t want to answer?

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.”