Emotional Association: You Need This with the Women in Your Life

There's a very powerful factor in both courtship and relationships that has an outsized influence on how "with you" a girl really is... or isn't.

It's something that makes all the difference in the world between her brushing off and deflecting interlopers who come in to try to make you and her break circle when the two of you have just met, or her indifferently engaging in conversation with whomever she finds herself talking to next, with little a care or concern about re-engaging with you.

And it makes a huge, obscene amount of difference in how much of her time a romantic partner of yours is going to spend thinking about you, doing nice little things for you even when you haven't asked her to, and going out of her way for you... and it even makes a very large difference in how much respect she has for you in your relationship, how personally insulting or not she is during arguments, and even how likely she is to cheat on you.

This one single factor is something called "emotional association", and it's a factor that you want to get going for you whenever and wherever possible.

Think of a family member or a teacher, boss, or mentor you've had a close and familial relationship with, for whom you hold a great deal of affection. If you have a good, tight relationship with your parents, this might be one of them; if not, you've probably had someone along the way who's fulfilled a more parental guiding role somewhere down the line of your life whom you have rather soft, kind emotions towards.

Imagine this person coming to you and asking for your help - how would you respond? Most likely:

1. Beaming with pride at the chance to be of service to someone so highly valued to you

2. Concerned for his or her well-being, if the issue being requested for help on is serious

3. Eager to help in any way that isn't going to totally strain or break you... or, perhaps eager even then

Or, imagine this person calling you up just to chat for a while and catch up on how you're doing - not to ask for help, not to offer it, just because this person cares about you and wants to know how you are and share how he or she is too. How would you feel? Most likely:

1. Glad to hear from him/her

2. Happy to connect with someone important to you

3. Perhaps coming away from the call realizing you haven't seen this person in a while and wanting to see more of him/her

Now, imagine someone you've known for a while but didn't have that kind of relationship with asking you for the same kind of help you imagined that very close individual asking you for; or, calling you up out of the blue "just to chat." How would you feel about either of these scenarios? Probably weird; probably awkward; probably wondering, "Why is he/she asking ME for help? Why is he/she calling ME?"

What's the difference?

Emotional association.

What Emotional Association Is

Emotional association, quite simply, is feeling an emotional connection with someone (or something, but we'll be talking about people here, and more specifically women). In fact, that article just linked to on emotional connection is a good starting point for getting some bearings on how emotional association works during the initial getting-to-know-you phase of meeting and dating a new girl.

When you are emotionally associated with someone you:

• Feel as if you and she are "in this together"
• Feel united with her, and think not just for you, but also for her as well
• View her as a "part" of yourself

The last one is particularly important, and I think a lot of people miss this. When you are very emotionally associated with someone, you view him or her as a "piece" of you. You feel more complete around her. When she's gone, you feel a bit less "whole."

It is like this with family; it's like this with close friends; it's like this with your lovers, girlfriends, or wife. At least, it's like this when your relationships with these people are strong, healthy, and mutually beneficial.

Emotional association leads to you "thinking for her" even when you're not around her; with a girlfriend, for instance, this can include:

• Doing nice things for her (saving her a spot next to you at the game even though she's getting off late from work) and

• Not doing things that might hurt her (refraining from bragging to your buddies about her learning to deep throat for you because you know she'd be embarrassed if anyone besides you and her found out)

When you've just met a girl, and you're feeling emotionally associated with her (which is going to happen if she's been deep diving you and screening you and getting you qualifying yourself to her - which, really, we want YOU doing to HER, rather than the other way around, but here for the sake of illustration...), things are going to feel magical with her, you won't want them to end, and you'll be excited about where things are headed. It's going to feel like you've just met the girl of your dreams.

There's a flipside of the magical "togetherness" of emotional association though - and that's the attainability extremes of no-challenge or auto-rejection, both of which lead (via rather different paths) to emotional dissociation.

Emotional Dissociation

If you've ever had a girl who was your biggest fan at one point, but had it all come apart at the seams and her start treating you like she hardly even knew you, you've experienced the fall from grace that is emotional dissociation.

The more general term "dissociation" is used in psychology to discuss the stress coping and defense mechanism of removing oneself emotionally from an object, environment, or person - you unmoor your identity from the thing, in order to protect yourself. For instance, you may be in school but scoring poorly in your exams, so you begin to tell yourself, "Who cares about school - I don't. I'm only here because my parents are making me go," and you begin to emotionally distance yourself and cleave yourself from school so that your inability to perform there does not affect your self-esteem too greatly.

When I talk about emotional dissociation here, I'm including this definition (as it pertains to people), but also including as part of my definition simply not being emotionally associated to someone in the first place.

So, walking down the street, you probably don't feel especially emotionally associated to the majority of the people you pass by, and thus I'd consider you emotional dissociated from them.

Emotional dissociation is the starting state of a woman's emotions toward you, until you trigger feelings of emotional association via your fundamentals, the connection you form with her in conversation, and the investment you secure from her. These things lead to her forming an emotional bond with you, and she begins to associate emotionally with you, seeing you as an increasingly important part of how she thinks about and defines herself.

If things go awry in the course of her knowing you - whether it's on the first date, or two years into your relationship, or after a 10-year marriage - she begins to dissociate herself again. This is the "breaking away" process that allows her to separate herself emotionally to abandon any emotional attachments to you and let herself be free.

Being able to recognize emotional dissociation - when a woman is beginning to either grow bored with you, or to auto-reject you - is key to avoiding the lion's share of problems you will encounter in your seductions of and relationships with women. Emotional dissociation only happens when you're doing something wrong with a girl - when you're making a mistake - but while you can be perfect some of the time, you can't be perfect all of the time, and at some point, you are going to make mistakes, and a girl you're with is going to trend towards dissociating herself from you.

How you recognize, deal with, and respond to emotional dissociation in the works is going to change the outcome of your seductions and relationships.

I won't spend time here discussing how to generate emotional association within a girl you've just met, since we've talked about that very extensively already on this site, and I'd only be repeating myself - see these articles for much more on this:

• How to Build an Emotional Connection
• Get to Know a Girl: Connection-Building Tactics
• Secrets to Getting Girls: The Art of the Deep Dive
  
• Spell Broken: Big Mistakes That Shred Conversation
• What Does She Want? The 8 Things You Must Ask Her
• Emotional Contagion in Seduction and Socializing
  
• Emotional Cresting: What It Is and How to Use It
• The Conversationalist
• Compliance Stacking

Outside of conversation, getting increasing amounts of investment from women is also key to this - the more someone invests in you, the more emotionally she tends to associate herself with you (her brain reasons that if she's investing this much in you, she must be pretty strongly connected with you - so she begins to feel pretty strongly connected to you).

I won't talk about it in relationships, either - assuming you're running your relationships with good sex, active listening, slightly more investment from her side than there is from your side, and a careful avoidance of open criticism (operant conditioning is fine) and any form of taking sides with someone else against her, you'll have emotional association automatically.

Rather, what I want to talk about in this section is recognizing emotional dissociation - and obliterating it (where possible).

How Can You Tell if She's Dissociating from You?

Depending on the length of the relationship and the depth of the prior emotional association, emotional dissociation unfolds over a varying amount of time - unless she's just met you and the association was only slight, it never happens in purely an instant.

This is good, because if you know how to recognize the signs of dissociation in action, you're afforded the chance to remedy it.

Obviously, if you approach a girl and she's unresponsive to you, shows no interest in you, and won't move with you, she's almost certainly dissociated from you, and isn't going to become associated with you without much effort and a heaping helping of luck. It's probably best to move on and find someone more enamored with your charms.

Conversely, say you approach a girl, hit it off, things go really well, and the two of you begin connecting and exploring her background and motivations and eliciting her values and all that other good stuff. The two of you are jamming; you're vibing; you're feeling sparks flying through the air (or, at least she is - you may be too busy keeping the spotlight on her... but you'll at least be able to see her falling for you).

Then, suddenly, something happens.

You make one of those mistakes we talked about in the article on auto-rejection and she begins to close off and withdraw herself emotionally and go cold on you. It isn't all at once; but you'll notice several things are happening here:

• Her excitement and enthusiasm about talking with you suddenly disappears

• Her efforts to learn more about you and push things forward dry up

• Her answers to your questions become shorter, more guarded, and less "free"

• Her body language starts shifting to closed off and turned away from you

• Her voice tone fluctuates down into a slightly deeper pitch, with less range and inflection

• Her eyelids droop a bit, and much of the luster they held when she was bursting with energy at your connection vanishes

• She becomes combative, disagreeing with you on things she might have agreed with you on before, and treating you like someone she's debating with and trying to defeat rather than someone she's connecting with and trying to cooperate with

• Or, instead of combative, she becomes patronizing and matronly, trying to take care of your emotions in a half-hearted, "don't worry, little retarded child" way
  

When you see this happening, your "Danger! Red alert!" signs should be flapping and flying like crazy - she's either circling the drain toward auto-rejection, or she's decided that you're boring, low value, and trying to hard to impress her, which means you obviously aren't the kind of man she likes.

In relationships, you will see these same signs as well, except you will see them more gradually, unfolding over time, and often alternating, between emotional association (where she's warm and thoughtful and excited and generous and your #1 fan) and emotional dissociation, with the latter gradually appearing more and more often and the former gradually less and less.

How you choose to deal with these signs - and how quickly and decisively you act - determines whether progress is regained and maintained, or your woman is lost to your mistakes with her and inability to give her what she wanted or needed.

How to Fight Dissociation in a Pick Up or Date

The instant you see the signs of dissociation mid-pickup or mid-date, it's time to stop whatever it is you're talking about or doing, and put the spotlight back on the girl. You'll usually want to precede this by gesturing off whatever it was you were talking about before (and dissociation almost always happens when YOU are talking - one of the reasons I'm a huge proponent of "talk less, get her talking more, and move faster").

That'd look like this:

You: [talking about something she's visibly dissociating from, and realizing it] ... Well. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. [slightly rolling up your eyes as you say this and waving your hand aside in a dismissive manner] You were saying you had a giant collection of elephant toys when you were a little girl earlier, and I think we rolled right past that. Are you still an elephant fanatic?

Her: Yeah... you know, I don't have the toys anymore - well, I think they're in a box in my parents' basement if they didn't throw them out already or sell them in a yard sale. But I love elephants still.

You: What do you love about them?

Her: Just that they're these sweet, big, gentle animals, that are also very intelligent animals too. And I like their trunks - I think it would be cool to be able to pick stuff up with your nose!

You: So you like sweet, big, gentle, and smart, huh?

Her: Yeah.

You: And big noses.

Her: [laughs] Yeah!

You: And now I know all about you.

Her: What do you know?

You: Well... [do a cold reading based on what she's just told you; here, you'd say something about her liking big, gentle, intelligent men because they make her feel safe, warm, and cozy like a stuffed animal, and she's going to agree, and feel much more associated to you]

There is a recovery period following near-dissociation during a pickup or date. She's going to be very sensitive to you say anything she isn't completely on board with during this period.

That means that if you wave off the topic you were on that was causing the disconnect, and then you go into talking about yourself or some other topic that isn't about her, you fail. Dissociation continues, and she soon departs.

It also means that if you try to stay on the topic and turn things around to smooth out the differences between you and her, you also fail. Trust me, I've tried again and again, and I am a great debater, salesman, and persuader, and all you're doing by continuing to talk about something she's begun dissociating with you over is pushing her further away, even if she might otherwise agree with you in an unemotional state. Once she's begun stepping away, she has closed her mind to being influenced, and that means that any further attempt to seeming guide, direct, or influence her thinking will be viewed as an effort by someone who is not connected with her, does not "get" where she's at right now, and is not looking out for her best interests - therefore, she'll continue to unravel with you, then get away.

In addition, it means you're going to need to cast the spotlight on her stronger than you normally would, to rebuild the feelings of emotional association that have been lost by focusing too much of the interaction on something she cannot connect with.

The most reliable path for this is:

1. Recalling a personal topic from earlier (which helps remind her of good emotions she was feeling earlier when originally discussing this, and recalls some of those positive feelings)

2. Asking her about it (getting her talking about something personal and important, which reboots the process of her associating herself with you via connection-building)

3. Using a little humor where relevant to get her laughing, but only after the connection has begun to be rebuilt (otherwise, it feels like you're trying to force laughter to alleviate the tension of the dissociation, which only further highlights and exacerbates it - she's laughing, but she's not associated to you)

4. Following up this light deep diving with a relatively safe and likely to be accurate cold read - vital for showing her you understand her at a deeper level; you're able to interpret what she's saying and read between the lines

It's important to do these in this order - if you try the cold read too soon after a dissociation event, she's going to reject it, and say she isn't like that at all, because she's in an argumentative state of mind.

Likewise, if you start cracking jokes too quickly to relieve the tension, she's going to feel like you're trying to compensate, which feels like you're chasing her - and she's only going to dissociate from you further.

Pull these off in the right order, though, and you stand a good chance of nipping dissociation in the bud, before it has the chance to undermine your pickups.

How to Fight Dissociation in Your Relationships

Emotional dissociation grows more as a slow-growing cancer in relationships than a quick boom-and-done phenomenon. Dissociation isn't a fight; it's a series of fights, blowups, frustrated dismissals, and gradual wind-downs of emotions that occur over time.

Nipped in the bud, it's easy enough to correct, but swept under the carpet, it only gets worse and worse.

There are a lot of people who think that the proper response to a fight or a girl acting moody and distant is getting it over with as soon as possible (fight) or ignoring it outright (moodiness) and then forgetting it ever happened. But fighting and frustration are your canaries in the coal mine; they are your indicators that something is amiss and needs dealing with.

Western men today seem to prefer to avoid dealing with problems most of the time; they try to avoid confrontation where possible, and forget all about the thing as soon as the symptoms of it are no longer in their faces.

Outside of casual relationships where you don't want to invest too heavily emotionally and you're fine with the girl breaking things off with you, however, in longer term relationships, you will frequently want to escalate things emotionally to get to the crux of the issue. In "Fighting in a Relationship: Causes and Cures", I discussed how to properly escalate relationship fights to get them to resolution then and there, rather than letting them hang around eating away at the relationship from the inside out, gradually souring your girl on you and causing her to dissociate from you and withdraw from the relationship.

The thing to be wary of is this: you cannot be lazy in relationships. Especially when you're inexperienced and haven't had any relationships blowup from the gradual accumulation of resentment or fade away from boredom yet, or if you're not really the confrontational sort (I wasn't, originally, but I've since learned how powerful and effective confrontation can be for making life run a lot more smoothly), there's going to be a tendency to recognize that your girlfriend is in a bad mood, but... hope it has nothing to do with you, and hope it blows over.

I mean, if she's not SAYING or DOING anything especially antsy, you ought to just let her be... right?

Right?

Actually, when a woman's in a bad mood around you, it's almost always a big red sign saying, "Fix my mood! Fix my mood!" which you can only do by confronting the bad mood and escalating things to the point where she spits out whatever it is that's troubling her (or gives you enough signs that you can figure it out).

That leads to brief bouts of anger and fighting up front, for distraction-free tranquility, peace, and good feelings later. Sounds like a good bargain to me.

Confronting relationship problems the moment they surface and nipping them in the bud does one other thing for you, too: it shows your girl that you really do care, and it helps you to understand her and what's going on in her head better, and she realizes as you run through the process that you're coming to a continuously better understanding of her, too.

Which, of course, leads to her feeling emotionally associated to you once more.

Closing Thoughts on Emotional Association

This sounds like a lot to take in, but it's at principle a simple concept. Emotional association is how "together" with you someone feels, based largely on how well she thinks you understand her wants, needs, and desires, and how much she thinks you're looking out for them. The more she thinks you understand what she really wants and needs better than she does herself, and that you're delivering on them and making sure they're met and fulfilled, the more she's going to allow herself to emotionally associate with you - to place her trust in you emotionally, and view you and her as parts of a greater whole.

Why don't men who are unattainable meet this criteria? Because they're so far out of women's leagues that those women, while assuming that those men very well could meet their needs, don't realistically expect those men will.

How about nice guys who fall into women's "no challenge" camp - why don't women emotionally associate with those guys? I thought they were bending over backwards to make women happy! Well, the truth about nice guys is, they're clueless - they do what they think women want, not what women actually want, and they very frequently get upset if women don't respond the way they expect or want them to. A nice guy says, "Here is something I decided you should value; now, it's time for you to thank me," and becomes frustrated, sad, depressed, or angry when women don't value what he gives them and don't reward him for his efforts. This is not looking out for a woman's genuine wants and needs and caring about her above all; this is him giving her what he thinks he ought to give her to get love, sex, and loyalty, and expecting her to conform to his expectations. Very different.

Emotional association is why attainability works the way it does. Out of her league? She dissociates from you, auto-rejecting and telling herself she doesn't need you to protect her ego. Too easy to get? You're trying too hard, which means you don't actually get it, and won't actually get her... and so, again, she rejects you, knowing that you won't be able to really connect with her and provide her what she really needs - not just the things she says she does, but the things you need to read between the lines to get, something that nice guys categorically are not able to do (if they were, they'd transform themselves into sexually exciting bad boys instead of dull, platonic friend zone'rs).

So, keep an eye out for the signs of emotional dissociation:

• Her excitement and enthusiasm about talking with you suddenly disappears

• Her efforts to learn more about you and push things forward dry up

• Her answers to your questions become shorter, more guarded, and less "free"

• Her body language starts shifting to closed off and turned away from you

• Her voice tone fluctuates down into a slightly deeper pitch, with less range and inflection

• Her eyelids droop a bit, and much of the luster they held when she was bursting with energy at your connection vanishes

• She becomes combative, disagreeing with you on things she might have agreed with you on before, and treating you like someone she's debating with and trying to defeat rather than someone she's connecting with and trying to cooperate with

• Or, instead of combative, she becomes patronizing and matronly, trying to take care of your emotions in a half-hearted, "don't worry, little retarded child" way

... and, when you see this in a pickup or on a date,

1. Recall a personal topic from earlier

2. Asking her about it
   

3. Use a little humor where relevant to get her laughing, but only after the connection has begun to be rebuilt

4. Follow up this light deep diving with a relatively safe and likely to be accurate cold read
   

In relationships, understand that this is something that will occur in spurts, with moodiness one day and happiness the next, with a gradual trend toward increasing levels of unhappiness and decreasing levels of happiness (that usually occur so gradually that you start chasing after her, trying to cheer her up, and working harder and harder to figure out what the problem is, as she withdraws further and further; or, if you're not the chasing sort, you just ignore her until she blows her top and leaves).

You can avoid this by confronting bad moods whenever they surface, figuring out what the problem is, and resolving it then and there (if it's not you or the relationship - if it's friends, family, work, etc. that's causing the problem - then you just listen; if it IS you or the relationship, you resolve it; and keep in mind that sometimes it's simply that she's horny, so if you haven't taken her to bed in a little longer than usual, sock that away in the back of your mind and give it to her good once she's calmed down - but not the same day as a fight).

Keep your emotional association levels high and figure out why dissociation is happening whenever you see it, and reverse it before it gets bad. Think of emotional dissociation like an infected wound - let it get bad and you're dead, but catch it early and it's easily treatable.

Catch dissociation early, treat it, and get back to happy, healthy dates, seductions, and relationships right after.

Best,
Chase