A great many men read game articles or watch videos online and get good at approaching girls and asking for their phone numbers. The problem is that they don’t get any further than this, and there is nothing more frustrating than having a smartphone full of flakey numbers with girls acting halfhearted and shying away from coming to meet you on dates.
If you are looking to pull hot girls, you need to learn how to get over this particular hump. In this section, I tell you exactly why you’re getting into this situation and the steps you need to get out of it.
We’ve all been there. You see a cute girl in the street, walk up to her, give her whatever spiel you’ve taken from this week’s YouTube video, have a friendly chat, and then ask for her number. Later on, though, when you contact her you find that the number fails to lead you to the sexual nirvana you had hoped it would. Instead, she either ignores your messages or is polite but flakey.
If this happens to you several times a month, that’s fine. Flakiness is usual and to be expected. When you’re walking up to random girls in the street or club, you are to some extent playing a numbers game as well as competing with whoever else is blowing up her phone on WhatsApp or Tinder.
But if you are consistently finding yourself in phone number purgatory—if it is a pattern rather than an occasional occurrence, it is likely that you are doing something wrong in your approach.
Here’s the problem. When men first get into game, they massively overestimate the degree of sexual intent they are injecting into their interactions, and that makes sense. After all, if you’ve hardly ever approached in your life, the mere act of telling a girl she looks cute should be, logic would dictate, enough to let her know that you have a penis and are interested in her.
Unfortunately, this is not the case, and far too many men are having friendly, flat, nonsexually-charged conversations with girls, projecting a “nice guy” aura and getting blown out.
Don’t be one of them. As with everything in life, pickup works much better when you put everything you have on the line.
The central issue is that most guys (and girls) are risk averse and don’t want to put themselves on the line for fear of being hurt and humiliated. Nothing wrong with that. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes total sense for someone to avoid danger. In prehistoric times, a man risked being torn limb from limb for approaching a woman from outside his tribe, so the inbuilt fear of approaching we all feel to some extent is based on a human instinct that is inbred.
There are two problems with this, though: one, we no longer live in prehistoric times, and two, appearing risk averse looks profoundly unsexy.
In contemporary times, the risks associated with politely approaching girls are extremely low. I have approached thousands of girls over the years, and almost nothing bad has ever come of it. I’ve annoyed a couple of boyfriends and been embarrassed a few times, but I have never been physically attacked, arrested, or killed.
I’m not saying that any of those things couldn’t conceivably happen in the course of a pickup. They could, but as long as you’re calibrated and approach with light and cheeky humour, they are all extremely unlikely.
The other thing is that girls simply like men who take risks. I have gotten with girls who probably wouldn’t have looked at me twice largely because I’ve had the courage to run up to them in the street and express my sexual interest to them. This is where cold-approach pickup has a huge edge over Tinder. Through your actions, you can demonstrate your qualities as a man (boldness, courage, sexual intent). So why do it halfway? Far better to go all in with every girl you approach and let her know precisely what you want. The issue is that girls are taught to be polite (and yes, there are plenty of bitches out there, but stay with me). Handing over a phone number is in many cases merely a form of politeness, simply a more pleasant way to get rid of a guy. The path of least resistance.
While new guys probably know this on some level, they choose to ignore it. They perform the lowest-impact approach they can, take the number, and go home feeling that they’ve scored a victory and then complain online when the girl doesn’t respond or refuses a date. Then they go out the next week, do the same thing again, and so the cycle repeats itself.
The only way you’re going to avoid falling into this trap is by going all in . What do I mean by that? Every time you approach a girl whether you go direct or indirect you need to leave her in no doubt why you are talking to her and what you want.
Many guys have this attitude that I approached her, and I told her she was pretty, so she must know I was trying to pick her up mentality.
No, no, no.
Girls don’t always know why you’re approaching them. You may simply be being friendly. You might be gay. Unless you make it absolutely clear that you are approaching because you are sexually attracted to her, you risk being ignored, or worse, friend-zoned.
I’m certainly not advocating that you walk up to women and tell them you want to bang them straight off the bat. That would be uncalibrated and counterproductive. Nor am I advising a heavy, intense vibe over a light and playful one, but what you must do is communicate your intent through deep eye contact, touch, and verbal spikes.
When you are talking to her, even if you’ve approached her indirectly asking for directions, she should be in no doubt of the message your eyes are communicating to her: that you’re imagining her naked, and you like what you see. There’s no shortcut. It takes practice, but try thinking sexual thoughts while you are speaking. That will get you a lot of the way there.
You should also try to touch her—not in a weird, creepy way—just lightly on the forearm or maybe the back. What you need to do from the first meeting is break through the “strangeness” of you and her getting physical so that it becomes anchored in her mind as something natural and pleasant. This will make the transition to sex later on much easier.
You must drop verbal spikes into the conversation. The two methods I use most commonly are double entendre and challenging . When speaking to a girl, I will commonly misinterpret whatever she says as having a sexual undertone to it (“Oh, it’s raining hard. Do you like it hard?”). I will also challenge her on some aspect of her personality (“You say this is the best coffee shop in town? I’m not sure I believe you. Show me your barista certification.”)
You must tease, and you must make the conversation crackle with sexual energy. You have to ensure that you’ve peaked sufficient interest in her that when you text her you aren’t merely that nice, friendly, entirely forgettable boy she talked to briefly outside the subway station.