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icycalm
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The Sheer Coldness of Cold Approach

Sat May 25, 2019 11:39 pm

PREVIOUS: THE BIRTH OF GAME OUT OF THE SPIRIT OF NERD PSYCHOLOGY


By the way, if I am making it sound as if the nerds invented cold approach, and as if no human had ever spoken to a stranger out of the blue for no apparent reason, that's not by any means my intention, since it's obviously a false idea; there'd hardly be a civilization if that had been the case; there'd hardly be a human species even. What I am saying is that it is a rare event, and thus an awkward one; and as a consequence no one is really good at it and able to use it to full effect. I can't even begin to count the chance encounters in my life with girls who straight-up opened me out of the blue, in the middle of the street in broad daylight even, in my days before pick-up, but which I wasted because I had no idea what to say and how to behave to move the interaction forward. When something like this happens to an untrained person—even to a natural like me—it's so unusual and feels so weird that, throughout the entire interaction, and even long afterwards, the mind is fully occupied with marveling at the fact that such a thing is happening/has happened at all, and there's simply no brainpower left to deal with the actual interaction, let alone to invent on the spot an effective method to guide it, physically and emotionally, from the middle of the street all the way to the bedroom. And if a guy feels this way—which is to say, too stunned to behave smoothly and properly and naturally—you can imagine how a girl will tend to feel in similar circumstances. That's why when you cold approach girls you should remain in the interaction as long as possible—especially if the girl seems to be reacting coldly or apathetically—provided she's not trying to run away from you or call the cops or something. That way you give her time to get over the stunned phase and her brain to catch up with what's happening and appreciate the opportunity that has just landed on her lap, so that she doesn't waste it—because her natural inclination will be to waste it. I have no doubt that a good percentage of the girls I open and get nowhere with are kicking themselves for weeks and months afterwards for not returning my interest, but by that time it's too late, especially if we didn't exchange contact details (which nets us another rule: always push for exchange of contact details, and in the last resort, if she insists on resisting, hand her a business card and walk away—which presupposes that you have a business card to hand her). The most extreme come-on I've ever experienced came from this older German woman in Tenerife a couple of years before I stumbled into game. This wasn't even a cold approach; it was a social encounter with proper introductions, and I still fucked it up. This woman—who must have been in her late-30s or early-40s, but very well-preserved and very sexy in her slutty way—was introduced to me by a friendly German couple who ran a restaurant and nearby bar that I used to patronize frequently in the seaside town of Puerto de la Cruz, where I lived for several years. Once a week or so, usually on the weekend, after they'd close up their bar at around 2 AM, they'd gather together their regulars and head over to a bar or club that stayed open until much later, and occasionally they'd manage to drag me along with them too. On that particular night this German woman that I am speaking of came along, and for the entire time we were out she wouldn't leave me alone. She would put her arm around my waist and press herself onto me while our little group walked around the streets; she would chat with me constantly and pay me untold compliments; and she would completely ignore everyone else. All I had to do basically was say "Let's go home", and I would have had her (my place was merely a block away too...), but I was too stunned by her behavior to find the mental presence to do that. When I finally gathered my wits and decided to make a move... she was gone. I looked around the entire bar for her, but she had left without saying a word to anyone, not even to her friends who had invited her over. And, ironically, it was precisely her absence which had allowed me enough of a break from her absurd behavior to catch my breath and gather my wits about me, and decide to fire back at her in kind. But I had taken too fucking long and she had grown bored, or possibly disgusted by my apathy and unmasculine behavior, and she split without saying a word or giving me any way to reach her. I could have asked my friends for her number, but I was too ashamed of my interest in such an older woman. Sexy or not, she was too old for me, and therefore beneath me. Which hasn't stopped me from masturbating with her memory a number of times in the years since. And what have I not done with her in my imagination: I'll spare you the gory details, as it would make even some porn stars blush. Given that I am usually attracted to, and end up with, teenagers, many of whom have reservations about giving a simple blowjob, this woman threw a tremendous opportunity in my lap for some really nasty sex, but due to her lacking game (she hadn't given me a business card, after all), and my non-existent one, it didn't happen. Nor was I a sexually inexperienced youth at the time; this wasn't Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate—I was a 34-year-old man who'd had over 30 sexual partners and over a dozen long-term relationships with girls from three continents and two dozen countries over a period of nearly 20 years. But this stuff just doesn't happen every day; to most people it never happens; so when it does you're not ready for it and are therefore prone to screw it up. Long-time PUAs, and especially the successful ones, inhabit an entirely different mental universe than the normal folk they interact and try to sleep with, so they no longer realize how weird their behavior appears from the viewpoint of anyone who's not a PUA, and therefore fail to make enough allowances for them, just like the German lady who almost raped me failed to do with me. With a little less aggression and a little more patience, plus the sense to exchange contact details with me if I was still nevertheless failing to respond properly to her advances, she would have had me, and doubtless many other guys she must have flabbergasted over the years with her female version of caveman game.

A somewhat less extreme come-on that I've experienced—which however occasioned an equally colossal failure on my part to properly capitalize on it—occurred again in Tenerife, in the same town, barely a block away from the area where the business with the German woman would take place a couple years later. It was past midnight and I was sitting with my laptop on the steps of a small bar—owned by a German acquaintance of mine again (they are everywhere in Tenerife)—working on Insomnia via the bar's Wi-Fi connection. I used to do that a lot in those days because I hadn't set up a connection at home yet, and to ensure a productive session, free of noise and distractions, I'd usually go very late, after the bar or restaurant in question had closed. So there I was, tapping away on my laptop on the steps of this shuttered bar in the middle of the deserted street at one or two in the morning, lost in the contents of my screen and utterly oblivious of my surroundings, since there wasn't a soul, or even a stray cat or dog to attract my attention, when I suddenly became aware of three young people ambling slowly past me in the street in front of me, barely six feet away: a couple walking arm in arm, frequently kissing and being generally all over each other, and a lone girl who was walking alongside them. They were obviously returning home from a night out and were clearly in high spirits and probably inebriated—or at least the couple were, for the lone girl was quiet—but far from any kind of state that I would classify as drunk. So I quickly sized them up with a look, since they were passing so closely by me they had in effect forced themselves on my attention, and then returned my gaze to my laptop's brightly glowing LCD and instantly forgot about them. But the little group had noticed me, and the girl in the couple disengaged from her boyfriend long enough to take a step in my direction and say something to me in Spanish, to which I responded with my usual line that "I don't speak Spanish". "She needs a boyfriend", the girl barked at me, nodding in the general direction of her lone friend, and I was so taken aback by this insanely awkward personal revelation, coming as it did at two in the morning from total strangers, that all I could come up with for a response was something absurdly lame like (because I don't remember exactly what I said), "I am sorry, but I am busy", or, even worse, "No thanks"—the kind of responses, by the way, that daygamers—even attractive, experienced ones—are all too familiar with. So the group kept walking—since the girl had fired her words at me en passant (they'd slowed down, but never actually stopped)—and I spent the rest of the night trying to forget what a great opportunity I'd wasted by focusing on my work. At the time, by the way, I hadn't had sex—or any close contact with an attractive girl—for months, and it had been years since I'd had a real relationship, and you better believe I was hungry for both. Nor am I some lame dude who freezes up and doesn't know how to talk to people; I've already enumerated the vast sexual and relationship experience I had accumulated up to the point (vast by normal person standards, at least; not by those of PUAs who do nothing else in their lives for decades than chase skirts)—without game even, nota bene—which I obviously never would have if I were lame. I am in fact a brilliant conversationalist, but such weird circumstances would have stumped anyone, at least for the first few seconds of the interaction, during which you must be quick on your feet to respond as if the whole business is quite ordinary, otherwise the window of opportunity will close and all the wit and sociability in the world will be useless, even if you do possess them. This is in fact a common refrain among beginner players, many of whom profess to be good at chatting and quite comfortable once the interaction has got going, but awkward and even fearful of it before it has started, and right at the beginning. But that's precisely game—overcoming approach anxiety is 90% of game—or the anxiety of being approached, in the little story of mine that I just related. To give you an idea of how anxiously I had acted then, consider that, after the girl had told me in English about her friend's desire for a boyfriend, I hadn't even mustered the courage to look directly at the girl I was being offered. I deliberately avoided so much as even glancing at her, delivered my stiff reply, and stuck my face back in my screen. You would expect the natural reaction to someone's being offered something to be at least to look at what he was being offered, but in the near-instantaneous deliberations and mental calculations that took place in my brain between the offer and my reply, I felt that taking the offer seriously and looking would have made me seem hungry and thus unattractive, so I went with my instinct—my natural's instinct—and feigned indifference. And this is a good instinct too and all naturals know it and listen to it, because in the kinds of social situations in which naturals thrive, it works wonders. But a real player has to often—and indeed, as I'll be showing later on, he has to usually—work in unnatural and anti-social circumstances, and he has to become comfortable enough with them to make them seem perfectly natural and social, and not be stumped by the kind of tragicomically bad game that girls tend to employ in the rare cases when they can be bothered to actively pursue guys, as in the two examples from my life that I just gave. The girl in my second example was indeed attractive, by the way; I know because I had sized her up in the first look I gave the group when I had heard them approaching. But it was a hasty look so I hadn't formed a clear idea of her in my mind; I registered both girls as "vaguely attractive", but they weren't actual prospects, and I was indeed busy with my work, so I didn't care. Once one of them had become a prospect, I cared, but the unexpectedness of the situation and the speed at which it played out meant that instinct would govern my behavior, and the only instinct I had at the time was the natural's one of feigned indifference. Today, after several years of pick-up theory and practice, I have several other instincts to choose from, depending on the circumstances—and far quicker reflexes to evaluate what's happening and choose between them—and my dominant instinct today in random cold approach scenarios—regardless of who made the approach—is to be friendly and affable and help all participants including myself relax by making simple polite conversation. And that's what I would have done today if faced with a similar situation: I would have first of all looked squarely at the girl I was being offered and smiled at her to dispel the awkwardness, then introduced myself and asked her name, disregarding completely her friend's awkward comment, since I know that this is what she would have wanted. And then I would have proceeded to chat with all three of them about how their night was going, the nightlife in Tenerife in general, their personal situations and mine, and so on. And after a few minutes of this I would have made an excuse, due to being busy with my work, and taken the girl's number, as I've done hundreds of times in various day and night scenarios since. And it's these hundreds of similar experiences that enable me today to act, and indeed to be, natural in a situation that is essentially entirely unnatural to the kind of creatures we are and have been raised to be, and the norms of the society we live in.

My point with these two stories is twofold. Firstly, I want to help you see pick-up from the girl's perspective—which was my own in these examples since I was the one being hit on—and understand that you should never say, "Well, if she had wanted something to happen she would have said or done something". It's quite possible, and probably quite common, for her to want something to happen but to freeze in the moment and not know how to act to facilitate that. I once spent no less than three evenings hanging out with two German girls, one hot and a mediocre one, and by the third night was convinced that the hot one had no interest in me—indeed I strongly suspected that she positively disliked me—and so made out with her friend, who proceeded to tell me, in the rush of honest confessions that often accompany the first make out, that both of them thought I was "super hot" and had been salivating over me since the moment they had met me. Talk about a facepalm! And then I had to sit there and watch the hot one being picked up by an ugly South American dude who was exploiting her momentary vulnerability—occasioned by her friend making out with me and her acquiring "third wheel" status in our little group—to get his grubby hands on her, without being able to say or do anything. But it was a valuable experience because it taught me to always go straight for the girl I really want without paying too much attention to girls' behavior—especially in the initial stages of getting to know each other, when people are prone to acting weird because they don't feel comfortable interacting with strangers. The hot German girl probably thought she was being cool and desirable by acting aloof towards me... and ended up with the ugly South American dude for her trouble. More generally then, since girls' initial reactions to an approach can't be trusted as a guide on deciding how to proceed, advanced game consists in making a solid, dignified approach, and then withdrawing while leaving behind some way for her to get in touch with you if she decides at some point in the future. If she does, the cat's pretty much in the bag if you know what you're doing—and quite possibly even if you don't; if she doesn't, the situation is far from hopeless, but great care must be taken when reinitiating contact to figure out if it's shyness that's keeping her away, in which case calm and relaxed persistence will typically win you the game; or sexual unavailability, in which case you need to back off asap almost completely and either write her off for good, or lightly ping her once every few months to check if her status has changed: all of which has been covered very capably by various PUAs (from whom I learned it in the first place), which is why we won't be getting into it here.

And secondly, and most importantly, I related these two experiences of mine and extensively analyzed them to drive home the rarity, and thus the weirdness, and thus the unnaturalness—the almost anti-naturalness—of cold approach; which, properly understood (as you will be made to understand by the time this book if over), is essentially game, is pick-up. How do we make this strange, unnatural type of interaction seem, and therefore ultimately be, as comfortable and natural as possible, while conducting ourselves as attractively as we can throughout it in the process? This is what 90% of game is all about once you've stripped away—as we'll be doing shortly—all the other concerns and activities that have grown up around it in the years since its invention. I repeat that the PUAs didn't invent cold approach, but they did study it extensively and turned it into a science; which meant that it suddenly turned from a talent into a skill that could be studied and practiced and mastered and perfected. And that's how the nerds, the unnaturals, became what Tom Torero calls "supernaturals", i.e. better than naturals; while the naturals themselves, like me and a few other guys who took the trouble to study this stuff and learn to apply it—despite our already by normal standards successful sex and love lives—became real-life James Bond-like characters (for training can overcome talent only when that talent is untrained; trained talent is unbeatable, is the ultimate, as every teacher in every field knows). Precisely how the nerds became PUAs we've already seen and analyzed in great detail, so let's turn our attention now to understanding and analyzing how the PUAs became naturals, and finally supernaturals and regular Casanovas.


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