Futuristic Words

I am on my way out the door. Tonight I have three parties to attend and a liaison with one of my favorite people on the planet, fresh from Los Angeles. Today is Day 15 without alcohol, exception the tequila shots a student bought me in Atlanta, the net effect of which were not drunkenness but a frigging hangover the next morning that plagued me well past sundown.

One of the parties is a “white party”, the mentioning of which prompts all my friends and family to ask various race-related questions. I am assuming it’s not a Klan rally, but if it is you bet your ass I’ll write about it. Regardless, I had a minor laundry emergency today, and while dressing found myself utterly without the eponymous clothing requirement. I will descend on this partie blanche clad entirely dans le noir. Naturally, if my host or fellow debaucherites ask me to leave, I will accuse them of racism.

I am also tempted to bring my messenger bag and tool with my Kindle. A gorgeous girl opened me on the subway the other day to ask about my Kindle—usually it’s homeless people, oddly, who ask me about the device—and she wanted to know if The Time Traveler’s Wife, which she had in her hand, was available. Time Traveler’s Wife was a fucking terrific book (and a movie so crappy words fail me), so we ended up in an enthralling conversation. An odalisk I am seeing also approached me to ask why I was carrying a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion in a bar. I don’t recommend it for everyone, nor does every book work. Psycho-Cybernetics, although a fantastic book, was extremely counter-productive. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian was excellent, as long as I didn’t mention the part where the one character gets sodomized to death.

So the main question for the evening is whether or not Future can a.) have enough willpower to abstain from drinking and cetera for the duration of the evening and b.) whether tripling up on parties and then some will even be fun without the chemical boosting. I predict strongly wanting to play Fallout 3 or Batman: Arkham Asylum by 0330. Actually, as usual, I’ll be WANTING to play Dragon Age: Origins, but that won’t happen until Bioware does whatever they need to do. Atlanta was delightful, but I wish I could have made it out to PAX.

Okay. Skin and whispers, serchez la femme, etc.

One of the great misfortunes of the SUISC’s earliest dogmas is the tendency to revel in the power of hard teasing, cocky and funny comments, indifference, and the effect these behaviors have on women. I was talking about Mystery with a woman last night, and she broke his system down as, “I’m going to punch you in the face! Now give me a hug!”

She was being funny, but if you watch videos of so-called gurus in action, the level of teasing can be jaw-dropping for the uninitiated. The catch is that the unitiated are, by definition, our marketing demographic, the people we want in the seats at our comprehensive boot camps and the people we want reading Magic Bullets. The average seeker who comes to Love Systems or one of our competitors knows a.) he would like to be better with women, b.) douche bags somehow seem to prosper with the women our seeker desires, c.) he would like to get douche bag results without necessarily becoming a douche bag, but d.) seriously, he knows the creases in his right hand and has named them like the valleys and craters on the moon, and he would really like to start seeing a concrete, measurable change in his love/sex life instead of whatever he’s getting. He looks into the available materials, maybe watches some videos on YouTube, maybe sees Cajun using the Retard Opener on his episode of Keys to the VIP,  and he thinks the key missing from his sex life is that he’s not being enough of a jerk.

Out come the insults. A fellow student of the game came out with our group last night and stayed well past his welcome. He had peripheral knowledge of the material, but he had only skimmed the surface, not plumbed the depths of the universe of material available for the real life lessons offered up by dating science. He would periodically make snarky, rude, or borderline mysogynistic comments and while no one outright told him to leave, he eventually found himself sidelined in all conversations and devoid of eye contact. Just being a prick isn’t quite the answer.

“Be the asshole girls love!” is a common theme of the e-books and seminars offered up for consumption by the desperate. Yes, by all means, I am sure we are helping women with our presence by making sure there are more assholes in the world; surely, we will all aided by that endeavor. I know when I go out in New York City I often think, “Wow, there really aren’t enough pretentious assholes, aggressive assholes, and stupid assholes here. Someone should fix that.”

Yet there is a lesson in how their confidence manifests in a way that girls find attractive. How to cultivate the confident part of yourself to make women want to get closer to you is a post for another time. For now, I wanted to talk to you about the part where you don’t try to get her to like you but instead show her how much you like her.

So let’s talk about qualification.

If you’ve taken a boot camp where I was present, you’ve heard me rant about qualification, one of the Oh-Shit buttons I tell men to press when they are uncertain what to do next (the other one being “movement”, which I broadly define and trying anything physical). Quickly, qualification is when you elicit information from a girl in order to praise her, generally for something other than her looks. That last bit is not set in stone, though, since sexuality and appearance are valid subjects, albeit not all the time and not immediately.

The structure is fantastically simple, yet eludes many. From Magic Bullets:

1. Qualifier – You solicit the information. Often, this will be in the form of a question, but it’s usually a better idea to fold the question into a statement. This is less true of harder qualifiers– see below.

“Holy shit, I just saw the Hangover, and I my stomach still hurts. It’s either that or my tapeworm. Have you seen it?”

“No, but all my friends want to, I’ve been super-busy lately.”

“I was wondering why you had that ‘I don’t know how to have fun’ look on your face. Wait, you do like movies, right?”

2. Her response – What she says, if anything. The harder the qualifier used on the dumber the girl, the more likely you are going to get consternated looks or responses like, “Wow, that is a good question… you’re putting me on the spot. I don’t know!” As long as she doesn’t blow off the question, this counts as a response, at least from a tactical standpoint. Any answer is investment. If her answer if insufficient, that’s for you to decide, but if you’re a real man, you hold her accountable for it.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Girls I don’t like.”

“My one big regret in life is that Kurosawa cannot be one of my babies’ daddies.”

3. Explore the topic – A lot of guys skip this part, i.e. making normal conversation about something you were interested enough to ask the question in the first place. If this step doesn’t make sense to you, you might be socially awkward.

“If you can name a Kurosawa movie besides Seven Samurai, we can be BFFs.”

“What if I can name two?”

“BFFEFLs.” (pronounced “biffles”)

“What does that mean?”

“Best friends for ever for life.”

“Ran and Rashomon.”

4. Compliment - The fun part. It should be commensurate with the intensity of the question asked UNLESS her answer to a low-difficulty question really blew you away. If she is saving the world or putting tiger sharks in chokeholds, being blown away by her occupation, i.e a medium level qualifying question, is normal. Those last two sentences are not tactically sound. Get to a point where you don’t care, but if a girl tells you she’s raising hundreds of millions of dollars to save starving kids in Africa or she just got back from climbing Mount Everest, I feel like it’s only appropriate to react vehemently. You can go overboard, though, which is where the next step comes in.

“Fucking rad.”

“What?”

“What back! How often do YOU get to have Kurosawa conversations within ten minutes of meeting someone in a bar?”

“Rarely.”

“See? We’re fucking rad.”

“Yeah we are.”

5. Pull back (optional) – This step is my bread and butter because I like giving intense compliments because I’m an intense guy. Compliments are like filling a balloon. If you don’t let some of the air out or pace yourself, the balloon might pop. No need to invent the wheel here; I pull back with stuff straight out of Magic Bullets:

* Too bad you come to [wherever you both are].
* Too bad about our age difference [if we’re about the same age].
* Too bad you are [astrological sign].
* Too bad I don’t like you [smiling and playful tonality are especially important here].

6. New topic - There is not much to this part. Part of learning how to improve your social skills is learning how to stack forward to new conversation topics without worrying about logical connections and maintaining an emotionally dynamic flow to the discussion.

Obviously, not all qualifying questions are created equal. Some are easy and some are hard. In general, the easy ones mandate obvious “yes/no” answers, “Are you fun/adventurous/a good friend?” and medium questions ask for more specific information, “Can you cook?” and every question in the Normal Guy Routine. Hard questions are the meat of qualification because they are build/signify rapport and because they tell you more about the girl as an actual person. Hard qualification questions demand insight/instrospection/intelligence, and a girl simply will not answer hard qualifying questions without a certain degree of comfort and relatively high degree of attraction.* In general, I think you should concoct your own hard qualifiers because these are the questions that will result in the most meaningful answers and most sincere compliments. Consider what answers would make you happiest from a girl’s mouth (besides, “Actually, I don’t have a gag reflex.”), and go from there. Stock bits include:

“If you could be anything in the world with no chance of failure, what would you be? Don’t say princess.”

“If everyone in here looked exactly like you, how would you stand out?”

“You’re a beautiful woman but this is New York/LA/Miami/Chicago and beauty is common here, to say nothing of its ultimate meaninglessness. I’ve dated some gorgeous women, and the only thing that really matters is energy, personality, and outlook. So far you’ve got two out of three. I guess what I’m trying to ask you is what you have going for you more than your looks.”

Again: those are stock. Come up with your own STANDARDS TO WHICH YOU CAN HOLD THE WOMEN IN YOUR LIFE, and use  those as points of qualification as soon as you possibly can.

[EXERCISE: Imagine your ideal woman. I know she's beautiful. This isn't about her looks, but it will probably help if you imagine what she looks like, down to the pedicure. Does she dye her hair? Does she have fake boobs? Does she wear bright red lipstick or lip gloss? Does she always show cleavage, or does she manage to pull of sexiness and class? Does she belch around her friends and family? Is she comfortable pooping/changing tampons in front of you? Is she comfortable putting on makeup in front of you? Does she want you to be around during any of those moments? What does she do? How hard does she work? Do you care if she's tidy? Do you care if she's a slob? Does she like video games or movies or reading or sports or outdoor activities or fighting or sailing? What does she do for fun? Does she like to sit and watch DVDs on the weekend, or does she have so much energy she can only do that about once a month, if ever? How often does she need you to compliment her? How does she react to your compliments? Does she compliment you? Does she cook? Does she have time to see you more than once a week or more than once a day? Does she like to fuck outside? Can she only have an orgasm when her face is shoved in a bowl of dog food? How many men has she been with? How old is she? What race? Does she like or sometimes prefer other women? What does she do when you're sick? How does she treat other men she's attracted to when she's in your presence?

When we ask these questions in boot camps, a lot of guys are so set on impoving their sex lives that they neglect the power of our hammering on about having standards. Don't do that.]

A final note about tactical structure: hard qualifying questions should never, ever, ever be asked around her friends. They are for isolation. Yes, I’m sure someone is going to write me and tell me about the time he qualified in front of her three friends, and they all went home and had an orgy. Exceptions abound. STFU.

After he has internalized the concepts behind qualification, our lothario can ideally enter a new conversation with a new girl with his perceived value at such a high level that he can just tell a girl how nifty she is and be done with it, but that’s not realistic for everyone. Unless you are Someone in her eyes, you’re going to have to generate attraction before you attempt to solicit any information beyond her eye color. A compliment is only as good as its source, and if the girl you’re talking to isn’t attracted she’s going to react mildly at best (“Thank you.”) or coldly at worse (e.g. with an eye roll). This is where qualification comes into play as an Oh-Shit button.

A common psychological trait of Love Systems students and nearly anyone actively studying dating science** is the inability to figure out when girls actually like them. Often during evening workshops students will come to instructors and recount tales in which girls send blaring, screaming signals of interest and students, so mired in their belief that girls don’t like them, have left the girls high and dry, assuming disinterest (and sometimes sending the girls home with a feeling of having been rejected, ironically!). This is why qualification is a magical tool in your conversational arsenal.

If a girl is disinterested, she simply won’t answer questions that make her qualify herself to you. She might answer, yes, she’s fun, and she might tell you where she’s from or what she does, but this stranger you just met isn’t going to comfortably answer, “If you could have a relationship with the best sex you’ve ever had in your entire life or a perfect, Notebook-style romantic love where the sex was kind of ‘blegh’, which would you choose?” or “If you could be anything in the world– anything– with no chance of failure, what would you choose?” if everything up to the point of your asking that question didn’t interest her. As such, qualification is magical because it lets the otherwise confused man to assess exactly where he is in the interaction quickly. A while back, Braddock noticed that I tend to qualify very, very early when I start talking to a girl, i.e. often in the first fifteen seconds. I start small, but I’m reading everything when I ask, “What’s your dream?” or “What’s special about [girl's name]?” And now you know why.

Sinn used to note that I would stay in a set WELL after I clearly didn’t have attraction. Sometimes they would turn around, sometimes not. But I generally acknowledged a failure state as a chance to try ANYTHING (or at least make my friends laugh while they look on). Now, though, I am confident enough in my attractiveness and appeal that I don’t tend to waste time with girls who don’t respond well right off the bat, and I test my appeal in their eyes as quickly as I can.

Note this is NOT advice I would give to guys taking a workshop or getting individualized training with me. It’s just too easy to blow a girl off because you can’t handle the social pressure. I’m not concerned about my ability to deal with social pressure, but I am concerned about wasting my precious minutes on this earth with one of the myriad pretty things who have never bothered to develop personalities.

*– Older models separated qualification and comfort/rapport. While it probably helps to stratify them for conceptual reasons, they are deeply interwoven in actual interactions. Revealing more information about yourself both reveals and builds trust. Later stage qualification doesn’t LEAD to comfort, it is a part of comfort.

**– I believe this phenomenon extends to the greater population and results in conversations about whether this or that action or conversational point revealed that this or that guy or girl liked the speaker, but I don’t want to presume so much. That said, yeah, I think a lot of guys and girls have trouble telling when someone is actually interested because what might be a blaring signal to one person is impossible subtle or ambiguous to another and vice versa.