The Pick-Up Diary

What is opening?

Essentially, it’s the first 3-90 seconds of an interaction with a woman, whereby you begin a conversation. With opening, there is good news and bad news. The bad news is that opening can be very scary. Men are biologically predisposed to be incredibly nervous when starting a conversation with a woman that we don’t know. There are good evolutionary-biological reasons for this (in prehistoric times, approaching an unknown woman without permission or an introduction could lead to violent retaliation from her extended family), but that’s probably not a lot of comfort. So, that nervous feeling you get and the little voices that pop into your head looking for excuses NOT to talk to that beautiful woman are NORMAL. You need to learn to suppress them, but they are normal, and everyone – even pickup gurus like Mystery and Style – have them.

Some more bad news. We not only need to open, suppressing our built-in emotions, but we need to open well. Opening poorly can doom the rest of your interaction with a woman, and any other women who see it, making everything else you do a waste of time.

What’s the good news? With practice, it’s fairly easy. Most experienced guys don’t even need to think about opening anymore.

The following tips will help get you started:

1. Have a canned opener ready – This is NOT a night at the improv. Going “situational” (e.g., “it sure is crowded here” or “that’s a nice purse”) will rarely work. Think about it. If a 22 year old woman has been going out 1 night per week since she was 18, and got approached 5 times in a night (and these numbers are major underestimations) she has been approached 1,000 times before you came along. Most of those 1,000 guys have tried something boring and situational. Use a canned opener – something that has been repeatedly tested with women and is proven to work. If you don’t have even one opener, I’d suggest Magic Bullets or the Love Systems Routines Manual. If you don’t have these invaluable texts, do yourself a favor and spend the money to get them and have your openers ready before you even go to the club, coffee shop, lounge, etc.

2. 3-2-1-GO! – When you see a girl you like: GO! Open her group immediately. Failure to do this will “stale you out.” Women like confidence. They don’t like to be stalked. They like spontaneity. Wandering around circling her, looking at her, trying to figure out what to do next will turn her off and creep her out. Get into the habit of seeing a group of people, and GOING IN. You’ve already got your opener ready, right?

3. Approach at an angle – Do not walk straight up to the group. Approach at an angle, tilt your head over your shoulders, and say your piece. Done correctly (and you almost need to see it to do it properly), you raise your value significantly by demonstrating that you do not need their attention or approval.

4. Smile on the approach – Don’t grin like a moron through the entire interaction, but smile as you walk to the set, and in the first few seconds of the opener. Smile with your eyes, not just your mouth. It may sound silly, but smiles can (and should) be practiced in front of a mirror.

5. Be loud enough – Everyone in the group should hear your opener. Your opener should be loud enough that it cuts across whatever conversations they are already having. Don’t shout, but make it socially awkward for them not to pay attention to your opener. Practice opening – loudly – from your chest, not your throat. If you put your hand on your chest, you should be able to talk in two ways: one in which you can feel the vibrations on your hand, and one where you can’t. Train yourself to speak in the way where you can feel the vibrations.

6. Don’t lean in – This is connected to being loud enough. You should project your voice enough that they can hear you from a normal standing position (or leaning slightly back).

7. Engage the group – Do NOT go into a group and talk to the woman you want to meet (the target). Engage the whole group. Pay LESS attention to the woman you are interested in.

8. Playfully tease the target – Teasing is a major tool for triggering attraction. The hotter the girl, the quicker you have to tease. It demonstrates higher social value, and women are attracted to men that they perceive as having higher social status than they perceive themselves to have. I’ve seen some of our instructors open with teasing, and many will begin teasing the target within the first 10 seconds of their openers.

Another crucial element of opening is ending it. The opener should be something short, to grab the group’s attention, and be emotionally neutral. As soon as you spot an opportunity, you should transition into get the girl attracted.

All these tips and techniques are covered in depth in Magic Bullets, which is considered the bible of seduction. Much more is covered in the book like how to attract women and how to figure out when the best time is to kiss a girl.

We’ve all been there: You’re so into that one special girl. She begins to sense a sharp discord with her own feelings of inadequacy and innate discomfort: this guy likes me too much. This you how you lose her…

Pick-up gurus tell us over and over again how bad “oneitis” is. But when you’re in the middle of that emotional maelstrom, it’s hard to hear why it’s important to kill those feelings for that special, magical girl.

Why? Because she’s not special, and neither are you.

In fact, in the book Getting the Love You Want, Dr. Harville Hendrix distills the experience of love down to three core emotions:

1.) This person is highly unusual and specifically tailored to loving me.
2.) I’ll never feel like this again.
3.) This feeling should last forever.

Biochemically, you are designed to react to loving emotions exactly how you do. Your emotions are not special.  She has loved before. So have you. She will again. So will you.

No, she’s not different. Imagine the most heinous, depraved, “slutty” thing you’ve seen or conceived. Now, know this: you know someone who’s done something like that or worse. Such is the reality of modern reality. Suck it up and deal. After all, you’re probably a normal, decent person, and all that deviance and judgment you just threw out in our imaginary situation there is NOTHING compared to the festival of sin that is your daily, hourly sexual fantasy life. What separates your thoughts from your actions? Sadly, it’s probably an issue of will and game.

No one is actually that special. But everyone is that special. That one girl isn’t worth a damn because everyone has a nugget of gold lodged somewhere in their chest. Everyone has some hidden glory. Sometimes it’s hidden very deeply. But there truly are a vast number of interesting, beautiful women, despite their minority status. In that same regard, no single girl is all you’ve made her up to be. Not one.

Some of you are reading this and thinking about This One Girl You Know. Seriously, not even her. EVEN IF EVERYTHING YOU SAY ABOUT HER IS TRUE! THERE IS A GIRL WHO IS BETTER-LOOKING, SMARTER, FUNNIER, AND NICER. YOU JUST HAVEN’T MET HER YET. That glorious sun goddess is still just another glorious sun goddess. We live on a planet with 6,200,000,000 human beings. And women are in the majority. Seriously, she’s not that special.

And that’s why you have those feelings for THAT special girl. That muse is only holding you back because what she’s really doing, what she’s really, really accomplishing, is holding you back from being your true, glorious self. Find her seventy thousand superior counterparts. Then return.

With understanding.

Experience and willingness to learn breed perspective. When you don’t accrue a lot of experience with girls, it’s easy to get sidetracked by illusions, to forget how mortal these divine creatures are. Then, you can find a girl you want, a girl you like, a girl you can love. And you will not love her out of habit. You will not love her because she’s just the prettiest girl you’ve ever been with. You will love her because she’s the best girl to receive your love. And that statement means something because you have allowed other, female things to happen to you!

To find out more information on dealing with ”oneitis”, check out this audio download. The first 10 minutes are FREE.

Most men are interested in dating science because they want to get better at interacting with beautiful women. Whether your goal is to land a playboy model or to start dating that cute girl at Starbucks, you need to learn how to sexually progress.

Otherwise, you are likely to get the all too familiar “let’s just be friends”. Unfortunately, most men are afraid to act out on their sexual desires, and the result is that they never push any boundaries with women. This causes their game to plateau below their potential, leaving the best opportunities to those willing to push the limits.

If you are too afraid to leave your comfort zone while learning to meet women of quality, you will find that the quality of women you approach is always low. You must push the limits of sexual escalation before you can find the right balance. Without ever pushing too far or too fast, you will never know if you are pushing fast or far enough. When you don’t get the result you wanted with a woman, make note of it, and then you adjust your approach for next time.

A prerequisite for being able to progress with women is understanding that they enjoy sex just as much as men – they just take a different route towards sex. Here are some practical tips:

1) You Don’t Need “Big Moves”

When meeting women you should always be commanding a sexual presence. Your two best tools for this are speech and body language. To start off, try holding your initial handshake for a second longer than normal while keeping eye contact. After that, try calibrating her to see if she is receptive to your sexual overtones. When talking, keep a slow pace, measured pace, and make sure to use pauses to add effect. Have fun with this – you can even try ordering a coffee using sexual subtext.

By immediately creating a sexual presence and calibrating the situation you can quickly screen for a women’s sexual openness. That way, if she doesn’t respond you can quickly move on to something else.

2) Leave Them Better Than You Found Them

Don’t make a girl do something she doesn’t want to do – she should feel great doing even the most “dirty” things. Make her feel like she is sharing in a fun, exciting sexual adventure with you.

This also applies to setting the right frame for later on when you progress further. If there is something you want to happen down the road, make her feel good about it. Tell her “you would look so hot doing …” or “the most fun I ever had with a woman was doing…” Those sorts of statements will create positive associations with whatever sex act you are talking about.

Most women derive pleasure from pleasing someone they like. Let her know you are enjoying whatever she is doing to/for/with you. Tell her “I love the way you do that” or “you look really sexy doing that”. It is important to be supportive of a woman as you progress with her. Men that express their sexual desires without any regard for the woman are considered to be sleazy, and you don’t want to fall into that group. This sort of disregard for women is also a good way of guaranteeing there will be no repeat performances.

3) Creating the Right State of Mind

To successfully progress with a woman, you must demonstrate to her that you want her, but that you do not need her. This is another example of the importance of finding the right balance. If you pretend you are not interested whatsoever, she will move on to someone else, or just peg you as a friend. However, if you act needy towards her, she will be turned off. Beautiful women like a little bit of a challenge. That is where wanting comes in – make it clear that while you are interested in her sexually, you live in a state of abundance, and will meet your needs somewhere else if she doesn’t respond to you. Basically, you must always be willing to walk away.

Finally, I know I’ve written about this before, but it is essential to remember that this is all a part of one great learning process. There is no such thing as rejection – only feedback. As you start to push the limits of sexual escalation, keep track of how women are reacting. Be confident, have fun with it, and keep escalating faster and further until you have to bring things down a notch – that is when you know you are starting to approach the right balance in your game.

To find out more information on turning an interaction more sexual, check out this audio download by Love Systems. The first 10 minutes are FREE.