Tactics Tuesdays

Usually you want to touch the girls you like. But not always. Advanced daters can use the ‘no-touch’ technique to ramp things up with harder-to-get girls.

Usually, the other writers here and I will tell you to touch women early and touch them often.

Touch is good. It lets her see you are not a timid man, unafraid to contact her. It helps you stand out from most of the men she meets, who either don’t touch her or don’t know how to touch her (i.e., they touch her in half-hearted or awkward ways).

When you start out, you will want to touch any woman you talk with, to get comfortable with touch, and in general to help you build the sexual tension you will have difficulty building with vibe alone as a beginner.

However, sometimes (particularly for non-beginners) it works better if you don’t touch. Today’s article will be about that.

Sure, you can give up, slink off, and go lick your wounds when a woman resists you. Or… you can make her laugh at herself instead.

Resistance is one of the more troublesome things you'll run into with girls.

You approach her to say hello, she resists. You try to talk to her, she resists. You introduce yourself to her, she resists. You ask her to move with you, she resists.

There are various ways to counter resistance. Depending on when in the courtship you face it, the advice can be different. For instance, a girl who resists on the open is a lot less likely to have a guy hang around and try to break through that resistance than, say, a girl who resists once she's back alone with a guy and mostly naked. Most men will be more persistent the further along they are in the courtship.

But there is one magical way to tackle resistance that works no matter what stage of the courtship you're at.

It doesn't always work. It isn't 100% - nothing is. However, it's the best way I've discovered to shatter resistance. And best of all, it's fun.

This way is simple: you make her laugh at herself.

You point out how silly she is, resisting you like this. And then you make her have a little chuckle.

Because no matter how stony faced she was before... no matter how staunch the resistance she gave you was... as soon as she's giggling or snickering at her own silliness, much of the time, now you've got her.

You want a girl to do something. So what do you do – suggest she do it, request her to do it, or command her to do it? Each can have very different outcomes.

It feels manly to order people around and command their compliance. Women respect and admire a man who can order others around. Even if doing so is not always the most tactful of moves, it’s the more dominant move, since it is the most effortless. You are not visibly considering the feelings of others or trying to avoid conflict; you are asserting your power plainly and without fear.

Given the popularity of egalitarianism in our modern societies, the rough, commanding element of traditional masculinity has been demonized.

However, this is a trick. You’ve been sold the idea that people don’t like order and being ordered.

This is both true and false.

It is true that people would rather be in charge – if they could be. Everyone wants to be at the top – if it was easy.

But it’s not, so most people choose a different tactic: trick people into not even fighting each other. Dominate through convincing others that domination is shameful, brutal, and archaic.

Machiavellian tactics at their finest.

Surely, you won’t be as proportionally liked as you would if you were more commanding and dominant, but you would be more respected and get what you want more often. Also, you would, if you became legendary, be liked more by sheer quantity than if you were to stay in your lane. This is the trade-off. You’re more likely to be liked if you’re soft, but this is only because you don’t pose a threat.

This is what was behind my series on self-respect and the ego/self. Those who shame or criticize the self and ego are nothing more than misguided softies at best, and wolves convincing you to don sheep-wool at worst.

However, the vast majority of humanity being soft, compliant, and submissive indicates that people do like order, or at least prefer it over other real-world alternatives.

Allow me to put it bluntly – if someone keeps doing something, he prefers it. I don’t care how harmful, unhealthy, or disturbing the behavior, if someone keeps doing it, he likes it more than whatever else is available. If someone is lazy, fat, and unambitious, he prefers to be that way, because the prospect of being driven, in-shape, and prideful sounds harsher than the occasional shortness of breath, erectile dysfunction, lack of financial independence, and TGIF mentality.

Social concerns are very powerful drivers of preference. The scariest consequence for most people is that others won’t like them.

When you set out to form new habits and self-improve, a big part of this is how to remember to make these adjustments in the first place.

Reader Kalyan writes in with a question about learning fundamentals:

“hey, i just noticed that your website lacks a very important article (or maybe i dont know of it. if thats the case please send me link(s)). i know fundamentals are important. and everyone knows eye contact is important for example.. but i find it very hard to consistently remember to consciously focus on eye contact... i feel because of that, mastering individual fundamentals like that is much slower. so, an article about how to learn or focus on fundamentals would be helpful. i know its a good idea to work on one aspect at a time, but how could you actually remember to work on even one thing when youre out and talking to women?”

It’s an interesting question, and in fact is one more concerned with mindfulness – the act of attunement to what is occurring both around you and within your head in the present moment – than the pure raw process of learning fundamentals.

The process of learning fundamentals themselves is straightforward:

1. Pick a fundamental to work on, be that eye contact, posture, vocal intonation, or another

2. Decide what to alter or improve in this fundamental
   

3. Make that alteration/improvement over and over across the next 30-90 days

4. Every time you notice yourself not doing it the way you want to do it, correct yourself

5. After 1-3 months (and many hundreds of internal reminders) have passed, it’s now automatic

This process can transform you into a man with impeccable, powerful body language, mannerisms, and behavior in a relatively short time (six months to a year for really complete change; though you’ll start to see the effects of this exercise as soon as you begin work on it).

Yet you must remember to remind yourself to adopt these better fundamentals to change them.

What if you can simply never remember to do it?

In Part II, we examine core tests in relationships – those do-or-die tests where a girlfriend hits you where it (seemingly) really hurts.

This is Part II of a 2-part series on core tests. If you did not read Part I, be sure to read that part first. In Part I, I introduced the concept of core tests, gave you a bunch of examples of these, told you why women use them, and showed you how to get past them in pickups and on dates.

We’ll skip the definition and most of the psychology in Part II and get to the meat quick: how do you handle the core tests women throw at you in a relationship?

We will have one small detour into psychology though. That detour will be to answer this question: why does a girl in a relationship with you test you at your core?

Not all tests are subtle. Sometimes women break out the big guns. But what do you do when she hits you with a test aimed right at your core?

In today’s Tactics Tuesdays post, we talk about a very specific kind of test. These are what I call ‘core tests’; they test a man at his core, aimed at what a woman dubs likely to be a core issue to a man’s strength or identity. A core test revolves around money, leadership, sexual prowess, and other areas most men pride themselves on strength in.

This is Part I of a 2-parter on core tests. Part I deals with core tests in pickups and on dates.

Women will use core tests on you at any stage of interaction with them. They will use them with you during the courtship. They’ll use them on dates. They’ll core test you in the bedroom as you escalate to sex. They’ll core test you early on into a sexual relationship, half a year into your relationship, or ten years into marriage. Core tests are the most dangerous tests women will use on you – yet they also present the greatest opportunity to set massively powerful frames.

We’ll talk about how to spot a core test, why core tests carry so much force to shake most men so easily, and how to shrug core tests off in a way that will not only make women’s respect for you shoot through the ceiling, but will help you yourself cement your own identity as an unshakeable man.

Core tests serve as a reliable way to show women around you a kind of dynamic confidence most men don’t know how to summon up. And in this way, they can be quite useful to encounter.

10 times to give her a phone call instead of send her a text: when her text replies are bland, when she’s a slow text responder, when it’s logistically easier, and more.

We have a cool discussion on the forum right now where one of our members (Big Daddy) chronicles his foray into making phone calls to girls. He began to mix phone calls into his follow-up repertoire after a few of our articles on phone calls here. He was new to calls at the start of the thread, but once past those early jitters he discovered phone calls suit him:

“Even if it doesn’t work out this already works so much better than texting. I mean my calling skills are 2/10 at the moment and I feel like I have 30x more leverage on calls. I’m actually having fun doing this “just for reps.””

In honor of this discussion Big Daddy kicked off, I thought I’d put together a list of the best times to call a girl... instead of send her a text.

Our occasions to call instead of text fall into a few key themes:

• When you need to inject life into the courtship

• When texting is inefficient or doesn’t work
  

• When you need to cover a lot of ground in a short time (like to rebuild a connection, or fix a screw-up)
  

To help make the right times to call clearer, I’ve split these overarching themes up into 10 distinct scenarios.

Our first is when your initial meet was only lukewarm.