“Mystery didn’t have the answers. A blonde 10 in a twoset at the Standard didn’t have the answers. The answers were to be found within. To win the game was to leave it.”
A MAN HAS ONLY ONE ESCAPE FROM HIS OLD SELF: TO SEE A DIFFERENT SELF IN THE MIRROR OF SOME WOMAN’S EYES.
— CLARE BOOTHE LUCE, The Women
Here is perhaps the best book on relationships I’ve ever read. Why? Because both men and women – but especially women – likely can’t believe some of this can be so easy, let alone true. But it is, and that helps us learn some enormously important things about our humanity. Whereas I love evolutionary and scientific books, like The Red Queen or Sperm Wars as referenced here, this book is crude, offensive, funny, and above all, real. As such, it’s likely far more appealing to the general population – which is why they should read it. In it, people can learn the lessons of those books and of evolutionary psychology, but a scientific background is not required.
Indeed, Strauss teaches little to nothing about relationships themselves; he admits this in the final pages. Still, I believe the lessons that lead to perfect pick-ups can help in relationships just the same: variety, spontaneity, emotions, yet also routines, confidence, give-and-pull. I’d love to be in a relationship where the two of us can still flirt and ‘dance’ back and forth, each being cocky funny, after years together. Is it possible? Only one way to find out.
Find, Meet, Attract, and Close. You have 3 seconds after you spot a girl. Do it. Smile when you enter a room! Be the exception to the rule of what everyone else does. Phase shift, and change types. Change physical locations frequently. According to one PUA, it takes 7 hours for a girl to go from meeting to sex; that’s the average. Stop thinking about what she thinks of you, stop worrying about it; she’s thinking about getting into your pants first!
Make open ended statements, let them ask the questions. Stroke the fire, always. DO NOT buy meals, drinks, or gifts for a girl you haven’t slept with yet. Understand the shit tests women do, and call them on it, play it off, ignore it, or play cocky funny. The only way to take a compliment is to say “thank you.” Have the balls to tell a woman you like, “I’d like to fuck you.” Just do it.
Then there’s the other 3 second rule:
“The way to tell is the other three second rule. It works 100 percent of the time. While sitting close, just let the conversation trail off. Look her in the eye while you pause the conversation. If she looks back for a count of three seconds, she wants to kiss. The uncomfortableness you may experience is my favorite thing in the whole world-sexual tension.”
“Anyone talking to a woman while simultaneously worrying about what she thinks of him is going to fail.”
Search for “I will never be afraid of public humiliation again” for an example of how to do it. The “newbie mission” is also a great tool – stand in a public place and say hi to every woman you see for an hour or so.
The second half of the book gets quite a bit more serious. He notes that you risk losing respect of your “audience” – in this case, women. And you risk, as he did, creating an insatiable hunger that might never truly be satisfied. As Strauss notes, “all the techniques that are so effective in beginning a relationship violate every principle necessary to maintaining one.”
He continues closing with these gems:
“I’ve never been a fan of one-night stands. Once you’ve gotten that close to someone, why throw it away afterward? I’m more a fan of ten-night stands: ten nights of great sex, each one getting steamier, wilder, and more experimental as two people grow more comfortable together and learn what turns each other on. So after I slept with each woman, I mixed and matched them like jellybeans.”
“Perhaps it was really shared emotion and experience that creates relationships, not seven hours of routines followed by two hours of sex. “
I love his end description in the final pages about his cock staying hard through his time with Lisa. Still, I can’t help but think about birth control influencing the picture – ultimately, of course, for the worse.
There are a ton of links to other books in here. Some highlighted in green.
- like Nancy Friday’s My Secret Garden, a woman’s sexual fantasy and other such books
- Frogs Into Princes, the classic book on NLP by John Grinder and Richard Bandler
- Introducing NLP to Mastering Your Hidden Self-
- Huna self-improvement book that Ross Jeffries had recommended, Mastering Your Hidden Self
- Ross Jeffries’s Unstoppable Confidence
- The Art of Seduction was classic PUA reading material, along with Greene’s other book, The 48 Laws of Power.
- music by Cesaria Evora, a diva from the Cape Verde islands. Her mournful songs, backed by a lilting Latin rhythm, are perhaps the best make-out music on the planet
- Eric Weber, the first modern PUA, the writer of the 1970 book that started it all, How to Pick Up Girls