Love Systems Insider

Date: June 2007

He said / she said: A real-life example

I get it. Every time the LSI uses the he said / she said format, I get a ton of email telling me that
it’s the LSI most popular feature. Every time we’ve done it before, we’ve used an invented
scenario based on a combination of real-life situations I’ve observed.

Now we’re going to step it up.

Today, I’m going to analyze an interaction with a woman (“Heather”) I first met three weeks
ago, from start to finish. This is the first time I’ve ever done this – because people know who I
am, I don’t post “field reports” or talk about the women in my life. And it’s exclusive for LSI
members.

In this analysis, you will see what I said and thought at every step on the way, and you will see
each phase of the Emotional Progression Model from Magic Bullets being used, even the
relationship phase, since we’re still sort of seeing each other. You will also see her perspective
and my comments on that. She knows and is fascinated by what I do, and is sitting beside me as
I write this. So the “she said” portion is my rewriting her answers to my questions.

When you read this, keep in mind that I do not have any special powers or any particular
advantage over other men. I’m not especially naturally good looking. I’m tall, have bad skin,
have to dress to hide that I’m slightly overweight, and I’m pale from lack of sun. I don’t do
magic and I’m not famous. Everything that I can do is because of the techniques taught by Love
Systems. None of it should be any more difficult for the vast majority of LSI members than it
was for me.

To illustrate this, I will reference key techniques and decisions in my interaction with Heather to
two fundamental resources: Magic Bullets and the Interview Series. Pretty much everything I
did with Heather could have been learned there, and anyone who studied them could have had
the same success with Heather that I did. She disagrees, of course, and says that I’m special,
but that, to me, is just further proof that Love Systems works. By the way, we’re not even
talking about what we teach on the Bootcamps here, which is the ultimate training for guys who
are serious about their game. All of our instructors were former Bootcamp students – and not
always particularly good ones at that – so we know the training works.
In meeting Heather, you’ll also see that I made some mistakes. I’ve left these in.

Part I: The Approach

Savoy said:

A friend from Toronto was in town. After checking out a new restaurant, we went to a
neighborhood dive bar to have a few drinks and watch the basketball game. It’s playoff time. I
wasn’t really in the headspace to meet women, but my eyes lit up when I saw someone come in
who totally fit my type. She had long straight blonde hair, beautiful skin, curves, and a fashion
sense other than the Hollywood uniform of designer jeans and a little black top – not the type of
woman I’d expect to see there. She came in with three men and one other woman and they all
sat a nearby table to get a good look at the TV.

My friend knows what I do and knows my type, so when we both saw her, he shrugged at me as
if to say “don’t take forever, but go for it”. He’s a good guy. The first couple minutes after you
see a woman you like are crucial. That’s why we grouped all of the things you need to be doing
into one mega-interview called The First Five Minutes, where we sort out what is and isn’t
important to accomplish right away, and how to do so. One insight from that interview is about
situational awareness. So I was mentally prepared for a mixed group, with potential “obstacles”,
a group that is sitting down, and a woman who was so beautiful that I was certain she gets
approached all the time, probably to the annoyance of her friends who I could expect to be overly
protective of her. I also noted that the venue was casual and not a “scene”, so I could expect
people to be a bit friendlier to strangers, but also a bit less tolerant of anything that sounded like
“pickup”.

I walked over to the bar, ordered two more unnecessary drinks, and on the way back to my table,
I casually stopped by their group and delivered an opener straight out of the Obstacles and Mixed
Groups interview: “Guys. Man to man. Is it cool to date your ex-girlfriend’s best friend?”
Here’s what it normally accomplishes:

1) Implicitly denies interest in the women in the group with the phase “man to man” and
talking about women you date and have dated.
2) Demonstrates Pre-selection (one of the 8 value triggers from Magic Bullets) by showing
that you have women who are and have been interested in you, and implying that you
have sufficient value that a woman would want to date you even though you are her best
friend’s ex-boyfriend.
3) Asks a question that the women won’t be able to help answering, even though you
specifically did not ask for their opinion. This usually gives you lots of opportunity to
tease them.
Did you notice that I bought two drinks at the bar instead of just one? Buying one and then
cruising around the bar screams “pickup artist”. Buying two implies that I’m on my way back to
my friend (and it is an implicit false time constraint). Establishing the false time constraint is an
important part of The First Five Minutes.

Now it’s Heather’s turn.

Heather said:

I met Savoy (without knowing who he was) after a movie. I saw him look at me, but I didn’t
think anything of it until he showed up at our table and interrupted our conversation, which was
kind of rude I guess, when he was asking us a question about his ex-girlfriend. He was talking
more to my friends than me and I didn’t say much until he suddenly stopped and pointed at me
and said “you talk too much”. I laughed but I didn’t know what to think of him, he seemed
different and confident but that’s all I remember thinking at the time.

What Really Happened:

Heather thought that interrupting her friends’ conversation was rude. That’s okay. Approaching
requires you to interrupt a group’s conversation and draw all of the attention to yourself. This
helps demonstrate social power and brings other people into your frame. Frame control is crucial
with socially experienced beautiful women, for whom framing and reframing is second nature
and who generally have much more practice at it than most men.

The line “you talk too much” is from The First Five Minutes, and is my default response when I
approach a group and the woman I like isn’t talking. It’s not original, but it works.

Heather noticed me checking her out before I approached her. That shouldn’t have happened. I
blame Mr. Vodka for that.

Part II: The Transition

He said:

As you should know from Magic Bullets, the key point in starting a conversation isn’t the first
thing you say; it’s the second. The first thing you say is the opener, and it’s usually about one
specific topic. The second thing you say (other than chatting about the opener) is what turns
your one-topic interaction into a “normal conversation” where you have the social freedom to
introduce unrelated topics. We call this the transitioning phase. We’re intend to rearrange the
free chapters that we give away on the Magic Bullets page, but for now, you should still be able
to download the “sample pack” which includes a thorough overview of transitioning. So go
download that baby now so we don’t waste time covering stuff that is available for free.

Assuming you have the sample pack, you’ll know from that chapter that there are four primary
ways of transitioning. I chose a phrasal transition, since observational transitions can be
awkward in larger groups and I hadn’t set anything up or been offered anything that would have
helped make a content transition work. So after one of Heather’s friends said something about
women and jealousy, I jumped in with:

Yeah, that’s just like my buddy’s girlfriend (pointing at my friend). She’s a beautiful girl, but
kind of insecure. I see that a lot in LA, where a lot of my female friends are gorgeous, and most
guys are too intimidated to even talk to them, which is kind of silly, because inside they’re just as
human and sometimes insecure as anyone else, actually with really beautiful women, they often
have more insecurities or sometimes feel like a scared and nervous girl in the big bad world.
Anyway, so my friend’s girlfriend Carmen – she was a twin, and her twin sister had a boob job.
Not dramatic, like a B cup to a big C cup. But then Carmen didn’t want to be the small-breasted
twin anymore, so she did the same thing.

Notice a few things about how I said this:

 I didn’t make “Carmen” my ex-girlfriend. The opener was about an ex-girlfriend.

Making the transition about an ex-girlfriend would have implied that I’m hung up on
previous relationships.
 The boob job part of that routine (credit Style I think) could have been packaged in a
different way to work as in the Opening phase, or in Attraction, or even in comfort. We
go over in Using and Creating Routines how to build routines for different phases of the
Emotional Progression Model.
 I pointed at my friend when I mentioned “Carmen”. This makes the story feel more
grounded and real as opposed to abstract and invented. I knew that my friend would have
been quick enough to play along if this came up later in conversation. This goes to skills
in being a good wingman (which is Chapter 19 in Magic Bullets and covered on the
Advanced Winging interview on the Interview Series).
 The part of the routine that begins with “She’s a beautiful girl” and ends with “big bad
world” is obviously unnecessary, but is a good example of subcommunication. It implies
that I am not intimidated by beautiful women – in fact, that I have insight into their world
and I don’t make them feel awkward by putting them on a pedestal.

This transition routine gave them something to respond to, and, crucially, led to one of the guys
asking me a question about Carmen (I think it was how old she was). This gave me an excuse to
sit with them. With groups that are sitting down, I like to provoke the group into asking me a
question before I sit. Then, in response to the question, I deliver another false time constraint “I
can only stay for a second, I don’t want to be rude to my friend” while sitting down, and then
answering the question and starting another conversational topic. This brought me into the
attraction phase.

“Locking in” to a physical position - like sitting with the group - that you can carry on the
conversation comfortably for an indefinite period of time in the future, is another crucial
objective of The First Five Minutes. So is establishing the false time constraint. As well as
asking the people in a mixed group know each other (so you can learn who is whose boyfriend,
brother, date, etc.)

She said:

When Savoy told me I talk too much, I started to pay more attention since that came out of
nowhere and caught me by surprise. I thought it was funny and cute and my friends seemed to
like him. I do have to say, I didn’t believe you when you said you could only stay for a second
since your friend was just a few feet away, so I knew you wanted something, I just didn’t know
what it was you wanted. I definitely didn’t think you were hitting on me.

What Really Happened:

Heather’s comments illustrate that it’s dangerous to go on autopilot, which is what I did.
Normally, sitting and delivering that exact false time constraint is the right move when dealing
with a seated group. In this case, in a nearly-empty bar, with my friend by himself and probably
within earshot, it probably wasn’t. I ought to have established a bit more rapport with the guys
in the group, and then invited my friend to meet them. It would have been easy to do, especially
since both my friend and Heather’s friends were watching the basketball game and cheering for
the same team.

On the other hand, it didn’t really matter. You can cause momentary “blips” as long as your
overall game is strong. It’s like how I talked about Using and creating routines in my interview
with The Don. Even if mess up a bit at the beginning, don’t worry about it. No one will
remember how it started, if it ends well. This applies equally to phone game, dates, or anything
else.

Part III: Beginning Attraction

He said:

Now I was sitting with the group. Having completed the Opening and the Transitioning phases, I
knew that I had a couple minutes of the group’s attention in which to make strong first
impression conveying value. There are a number of ways to do this – Chapter 7 of Magic
Bullets covers them all in detail. In this particular situation, judging by the low-key environment
and very casual behavior from the group, I opted to keep things simple. I was going to
concentrate on demonstrating humor and on implying social status. At this stage, I was still far
more concerned with Heather’s friends than with Heather. Since most of those friends were
men, I wanted them to see me as someone cool to hang out (Humor) with and someone who had
things going for him (Status).

I have a decent sense of humor that I’ve consciously developed from going to comedy clubs and
acting class. A few months ago, I polled the approximately 43,000 members of the Attraction
Forum to find what things men had found to help their sense of humor in the real world, and you
can check out the results here.

To demonstrate status, I first asked a couple of the people at the table what they did for work,
and chatted about that for a little while. This baited them into asking me the same question,
which allowed me to roll out my story about how I got to be where I am today.

 You cannot get, or if you can get, you cannot hold, a highly desirable woman
without a coherent, consistent, and convincing identity that is both interesting and
attractive to her as well as congruent with who you really are.

There’s no way we can do a reasonable treatment on identity here, and it’s both unnecessary and
impossible. Unnecessary, because the theory has been amply covered elsewhere – partially in
Magic Bullets but also very much so in the Interview CD on Identity. Impossible because your
identity has to be congruent with your own personality; duplicating my identity routines would
be counter-productive. This is why we reserve a portion of the third day of our bootcamps to
work with individual students on choosing and conveying their unique identities. (Identity can
also be covered in individualized training or phone consultations; email us for details)

As a piece of shorthand, ask yourself two questions:

1) Does every group you meet know “who you are” within the first five minutes of meeting
them, and do you have a plan to ensure that that happens?
2) Is the question “what do you do” one you try to deflect, or do you see it as a fantastic
opportunity to convey multiple attributes of who you are?
You know what the answers should be. If your answers are different, fix this aspect of your
game.

It was during this conversation that Heather jumped in and asked me what college I went to (it’s
part of my identity routine, and I deliberately make it sound vague. Quick summary: Leave some
details out of your story so the listeners have to ask about them – it makes them more engaged.
Do this especially in the attraction phase. Of course, for Heather to have jumped into the
conversation, she had to have been hearing it. So I made sure I was loud enough for the entire
group to hear.

When she asked this, I took it as a sign of interest, or at least curiosity. It gave me the chance to
be a playful with her and build up some attraction. I told her that she looked like a fortune teller
woman I met, especially her hair (which is a slight tease, since fortune tellers are not generally
thought of as beautiful), and that she should be able to guess. She tried, and I pretended to
deduct “points” from her for guesses that I arbitrarily decided were silly. That she was willing to
do this was another sign of attraction. And then came one of my favorite lines “actually, you
can’t be a fortune teller, I just saw that you have no line of fate on your hand” and immediately
segued into a conversation - with the whole group again, especially the guys I was talking to
earlier - about palm reading, why it’s real, and how it relates to my history. She asked me to tell
her more, but of course I (playfully) refused and teased her again for trying to hog all of the
attention.

That’s a pretty dense paragraph, but if you break it down, what I did was:

 Baited her into joining my conversation

 Not answer a direct question from her
 Teased her a little bit
 Had her jump through my hoop with the guessing (testing to see if she was willing to
follow my directions)
 “Seeded” a future conversation (about palm reading and a line on her hand)
 Released the 1-1 tension that we’d built up by being the first to turn the conversation
back to the group

You can see that there were some small indicators that she was interested in or curious about me.
She wasn’t jumping up and down telling me “I want to bear your children” but it doesn’t have to
be like that, and kind of attraction. It doesn’t have to be, and it would be out of place in that
environment with her friends around.

She said:
Savoy just seemed to breeze into our group. I hate to admit it, but I became more curious about
him the more he didn’t seem to be paying any specific attention to me. I don’t remember if I was
attracted to him at first, I think I was just curious about what college he went to, but his answer
and little game was kind of fun. I wouldn’t say that I was totally into him or anything and I
wasn’t really thinking that way it was more like he’s interesting and not a loser, but I was pretty
casual about the whole thing.

Part IV: Combining groups

He said:

This actually was going on at one point during Part III, but I separated them for simplicity.
Combining Groups isn’t a stage of the Emotional Progression Model from Magic Bullets (the
three parts before this represent the first three parts of the Model: Approaching, Transitioning,
and Attraction). In this case, where one group is made up of my friend(s), it’s more of a
“wingman” tactic, and is covered in Chapter 19. Still, it needed to be done, and relatively soon.
I’d already been with Heather and her friends for a few minutes, and they were going to start
wondering why I’d left my friend alone. One of the crucial rules from the chapter on winging is
that you must treat your friends as high-value individuals and give them precedence over any
woman or group you’ve just met.

Now, if my friend had studied Magic Bullets, he would have known to come over to my new
table after a few minutes and introduce himself. But he hadn’t, and just sat there, watching the
basketball game. I could have called for him at any time, but doing so too early could have
demonstrated a lack of Social Intuition, since it’s not terribly normal to join a group of strangers,
hang out for a couple of minutes, and then invite your friends. More importantly, it would have
implied that I’d joined their group for the long haul (settling my friends in, etc.), which would
have destroyed the ambiguity over how long I was staying. This ambiguity is important because
it changes the question in the group’s mind from “is this guy fun?” to “do we really want this
guy with us for the rest of the night?” It’s easier to get a “yes” to the first question than it is for
the second.

So when I asked the people at the table what they did for a living, I started looking for a
commonality between any of them and my friend. If I didn’t find one in a couple of minutes, I
was simply going to say “hey you guys should meet my friend” and invite him over. But I was
able to find a commonality (they both play rugby), which allowed me to say “yeah, my friend
played for a club team in Toronto. Hey [name], come meet these guys. Darren is a rugby
player”. This got my friend into the group, and gave him someone to talk to and something to
talk about.
She said:

I noticed when your friend came over, but I wasn’t really paying attention to how.

What Really Happened:

Heather’s reaction was exactly what I’d been hoping for. Changes to logistics (moving
somewhere, adding or separating people from the group, moving to a 1-1 private conversation,
etc.) are like referees in sports. If they’re doing a good job, you don’t notice them. There’s an
analogy here to the concept of state breaks in the Seduction phase, which we’ll get to later. If I’d
acted like getting my friend into the group was a big deal, then it would have become a big deal
and people would have noticed and questioned in. I didn’t, so they didn’t.

It’s the same principle as in the Seduction phase, when you want to avoid state breaks. Casually
driving a woman so that you end up at your house alone at the end of the night is great, but isn’t
something you should draw a lot of attention to or make into a big deal. Doing so creates a state
break.

Part V: Attraction

He said:

According to the Emotional Progression Model from Magic Bullets, I was in the “attraction”
phase. Incidentally, it’s worth checking the publications page frequently; it’s something we’re
going to be adding to a lot now that we’ve got it set up.

In this case, that meant deepening her curiosity about me into attraction and starting some
touching between us. Physical touching is crucial to successful pickups. We cover this in Magic
Bullets, but in more detail in The First Five Minutes (which explains how to get touching started)
and Physical Escalation and Kissing (which is an overview of the whole physical process).

Touching wasn’t going to be easy in the way we were sitting, with Heather across from me and
separated by one of her friends. So my next big move was to order a pitcher of beer for the table
(we were watching the basketball game after all). When it arrived, I “noticed” that the table had
become crowded with my friend and I joining and a pitcher and several glasses arriving. This
allowed me to suggest moving another table alongside, which in addition to giving us more
room, broke up the current seating arrangement. As we moved our chairs around, I made sure
that I was sitting next to Heather. I tried not to make it look obvious, but I was willing to risk it
being obvious rather than continuing to sit so far from her. In the end, it worked without causing
too much distraction.

These kind of logistical moves depend on situational awareness. This is the type of thing we
teach on our Bootcamps. While every situation is different, they fall into broad patters (e.g., two
women standing at a bar dressed for a night out, a group of casual-looking men and women in
their 20s sitting and drinking beer, etc) and the bootcamps are a great place to see how the
masters address different types of groups.

Once I was seated next to her, if anything I ignored her for the next few minutes even more than
I had previously. I wasn’t teasing her at this point or making a big deal of ignoring here – I was
polite, outgoing, and fun, but just apparently more interested in her friends and in the basketball
game than in her. There were a couple of reasons for this:

1. I was actually interested in the basketball game. This conveyed that I have interests and
hobbies and have enough going on in my life that it doesn’t change around just because
there’s another beautiful woman around.
2. I knew I could take things slowly. In a normal interaction, there is no way that I would
be about ten minutes in and not talking to her much. In a normal interaction, you don’t
know how much time you’ll have. In this case, I knew that the group had come together,
to watch the basketball game, so it was reasonable to assume that everyone in the group
would be staying for at least a good chunk of the game.

To solidify attraction, I used every time Heather said something to me as an opportunity to make
eye contact and touch her in a friendly way while responding, and then immediately turning back
to her group.

She said:

I hate to sound so passive, but I was really just letting things flow. I thought he was interesting,
and when he sat beside me, my friend Lauren and I definitely shared a look, a kind of “hmmm,
what’s going on here?” kind of look. From your description of what happened, I want to say that
you weren’t being unfriendly or anything, you were being very social and doing your thing, but
without paying all that much attention to me.

I started to really feel the chemistry after we were sitting together. Every time we looked at each
other it was like there was a bit of tension building up, and that’s sexy.

What Really Happened:

The most important thing Heather said here was about the “tension” we had. The element of
sexual tension is crucially important. It’s a tough thing to describe. Imagine you’re about to kiss
a woman for the first time. You turn to look at her, you make eye contact, and neither of you say
anything. The atmosphere that surrounds that is sexual tension. Learn to recognize this feeling,
as it will appear in a variety of situations and most successful “pickups”. With practice, you’ll
be able to recognize and feel sexual tension as if it were tangible.

This tension is your friend. It’s builds attraction and is arousing to women. Often men make the
mistake of allowing this tension to dissipate. Kissing a woman is a perfect example of this.
There is a world of difference between the type of kiss that continues to build sexual tension and
the type of kiss that “gets it out of your system” and results in a drop of interest for each other.
We cover this in Sinn and The Don’s interview on Physical Escalation and Kissing as well in
great detail in chapters 12 (Social Circle) and 17 (Kissing) of Magic Bullets.

Many men make the mistake of deliberately dissipating sexual tension (credit Juggler for this
thought). Tension is created through anticipation and fantasy. A woman can be freer to enjoy
the temptation and anticipation of being passionate with you if there are barriers to it actually
happening. For example, there is tension between me and my friend’s ex-girlfriend, who was my
friend before they started dating. She’s free to indulge in fantasies about me because she knows
that she is off-limits. We have plenty of sexual tension. If I ever went to her and told her that I
didn’t see any reason why we couldn’t date, it would dramatically diminish the tension. She may
or may not still be interested, but an element of the passion would be lost, at least temporarily.
Crediting Juggler again, successful men often deliberately create barriers that would “prevent”
themselves from getting together with a woman, so as to allow the sexual tension to build up,
only to allow it to be released in a situation where they could follow it to its logical conclusion.

Part VI: Qualification

He said:

The attraction phase merges into the qualification phase (and if you don’t understand what I
mean by this, click here for a refresher in the Emotional Progression Model). We once thought
that there was a sharp line dividing the phases of the model, but this isn’t really true – it’s more
of a general progression with a lot of merging. So, while in the attraction phase, I was hoping
that she would say something that I could “notice” about her as a “reason” to become more
interested in her. This would begin the qualification process. If she didn’t say anything like this,
then I would have to subtly help her find something for me to qualify her about.

This is a much more complex and subtle process than we have time to go over here. Fortunately,
qualification theory is explained step-by-step in great detail in two different places (and from two
different perspectives, so both are valuable): Chapter 8 of Magic Bullets and Sinn’s audio
interview on Qualification

I was in the middle of telling a story about watching a basketball game in Israel when Heather
asked me where I went when I was there. A question like this implies that she’s been to Israel
too, which allowed me to get really excited comparing travel notes. This naturally allowed me to
talk to her 1-1, even within the context of the larger group. Once in a private conversation, I
could find out whether she was adventurous, compare future travel plans, and “test” her to see if
we’d be good traveling companions.

After a few minutes, I told her, with genuine feeling, that she’d be a really fun person to travel
with and we’d have so much fun, and I described the things we’d do in detail so she could
imagine herself with me…if only she wasn’t such a princess (the last bit delivered in a different,
joking, tonality). This princess comment is known as a “release” in qualification.

By the way, the idea of being able to have a private conversation (“isolating”) without actually
leaving the group is discussed in Chapter 9 on “Comfort” in Magic Bullets. In many situations,
isolating is just fine. In others, like this one, it could have been socially awkward. And
sometimes either approach would work.

Qualification is much easier if you’ve been paying attention to a woman and have some ideas
about what to qualify her on. I’d learned that Heather was pretty articulate, had a career and
career goals, and was surrounded by friends who also seemed to be educated and professional.
This is one of the things that made me interested in her, and it also gave me a decent path to
qualify her again. Intelligent, professional women tend to a read a fair bit. I told a funny story
about setting up a book club in Los Angeles, which I hoped she would comment on, but she
didn’t. Maybe I guessed wrong, and she doesn’t read for fun? It was still worth a shot to pursue.
So I asked her whether she likes to read. She said yes. I asked what kind of books she liked.
Unless you are ridiculously well-read, don’t ask “what’s your favorite book?” or “what’s your
favorite author?” It will inevitably be one you’ve never heard of. You can be specific with
music, but not as much with books.

She mentioned liking a few different genres, the only one of which interested me was
psychology. So we ran with that for a while. I told her what book we were reading and that she
could come to our book club, without offering or taking contact information. This seeded the
idea in her head that we could see each other again, without appearing too eager.

It also gave me a backup plan to make sure I got this contact information. When you go out as
much as I do, you realize that random annoying things happen all the time that will mess things
up. My friend might have eaten a bad chicken wing and needed to go home. 10 of her friends
might have showed up and disrupted the night. The TVs in the bar might have gone off. And so
on. If you’ve ever been in a bar at closing time when her friends are dragging her away, you
know that feeling of having left planning a future encounter (or the next event in the night) too
late.

If I all of a sudden had to take my friend home, it would be weird and awkward if I paused for
two minutes to talk about seeing her again. But having seeded the book club idea, I could, in
such a situation, say something like “I really have to go but hey write your email down and I’ll
let you know the next time we’re getting together for the book club”. As you know from Magic
Bullets, this would be far from ideal as a way of making sure I saw her again, but it would be
better than the alternative. As you get more advanced, you should not only be thinking about the
situation at hand, but also planning for multiple contingencies.

Fortunately, in this case, the chicken wings were all good.

She said:

The “do you like to read” question came out of nowhere and I wondered what he meant by that.
It seemed like it was something he really wanted to talk about, which is different because most
guys don’t. You didn’t mention the story you told about working in a bookstore when you were
in high school, which made me laugh. I liked talking about traveling together, that was fun, and
the way he ended it was just perfect, even though I knew he had an agenda, I couldn’t help
laughing and enjoying it all. Truth is I liked that he had an agenda but he’d taken the time to get
to know me first.

Most guys are really serious, I liked that he had a lot to say but wasn’t taking himself or our
conversation too seriously.

What Really Happened:

The qualification process here was pretty textbook. Remember, you don’t need to qualify her on
every topic you can think of. In this case, two was enough. We’d organically developed a
rapport from just chatting and sharing the table and getting along with each others’ friends. So I
wasn’t going to draw this out. You only need to qualify a woman enough so that she feels that
you have genuine reasons to be interested in her, beyond her looks. You don’t have to go
through your entire checklist. You’re looking for reasons to be interested in her, not assessing
whether you are going to marry her. The most powerful justification for being interested is what
you built together – the shared experiences, values, and rapport. This mostly comes in Comfort,
which is where we’re going next….
At a tactical level, there’s a lot more explaining what I did and why in Chapter 8 of Magic
Bullets and the interview series on Qualification. At a more fundamental level, a lot of this was
about Frame Control. The best material out there on Frame Control can be found in the
interview series with myself and Sinn on…you guessed it….Frame Control.

Part VII: Comfort & the Phone Number Exchange

He said:

The situation was favorable to building comfort. Heather’s friends were genuinely cool and
interesting, we were in a relaxed atmosphere, the basketball game provided an external source of
entertainment, and we were all having a couple of drinks.

Other than being relaxed and social, and periodically refreshing her attraction and qualification
levels (Chapter 9 of Magic Bullets), my goal was to make sure I saw her again. I didn’t try for
the same-night lay for reasons I explain in the “what really happened” section.

I started by dropping “bait” about interesting things that I was doing or thinking about doing in
the coming week. Either Heather was being deliberately difficult, or I was fishing with the
wrong bait. I mentioned going to check out the movie festival. No reaction. We talked about
how we like trying new foods, so I mentioned an Ethiopian restaurant that just opened. No
reaction. I mused aloud about how fun it would be to go see a movie premiere. She said “yeah”.
As Future explains in the interview CD on Dates and Time Bridging, I didn’t just run these one
after another; I left some space in between.

Since none of that worked, I had to be more direct. After a few minutes more of talking with her
friends, I started a conversation with her about acting, and my acting class. After a bit of talk, I
mentioned how I have see a certain number of shows every semester and was going to go that
week, so she could come keep me company, maybe Tuesday.

She agreed. So it was time to get her number. Since we were in front of her friends (even
though they liked me and she was confident and secure), I wanted to do so quickly and
unobtrusively. I pulled out my phone to “look at a text message”, asked her number, texted her
something with callback humor, and then put it away. Phones save outgoing texts, so I knew I
could put her number into my phone later. And she’d have my number from receiving the text.

The rest of the night was casual. The game ended, we stayed for a last drink, then as the energy
was dropping, my friend and I left, with smiles and handshakes all around.
I called her the next day (Monday). It’s generally good practice to call the next day, though
having spent a lot of time with her, when she was reasonably sober, I could have waited longer.
But if I figured I’d call on Monday to see about the Tuesday date possibility.

Notice that Tuesday is a “date possibility”, not a date. Women often make on-the-spot dates
without feeling committed to them later. So when I got her on the phone, I didn’t start with
organizing a time and place. If I’d done that, it was have implied that I was fixated on seeing her
again, and that might have cost me value at this stage of our interaction. The concept of value
and how even the smallest things can raise or lower it, is covered thoroughly by Future and
Tenmagnet in our newest interview, Value.

I went through the standard phone game structure (false time constraint, re-attract, raise buying
temperature – all of this is covered in the Phone Game and told her conversationally about a
couple of things I had planned later, and asked what she was doing this week. She didn’t
mention anything about Tuesday (either about our plans or about doing something else), so I
asked if she still wanted to keep me company and catch a couple of shows. She did, we set a
time, and I told her I’d text her my address and directions.

Then we chatted a few minutes more, and I got off the phone first, leaving her on a high note.
Textbook.

Everything I’m talking about here, is covered in the “big three” phone/date resources:

1. Magic Bullets, chapters 9 (Comfort), 17 (Dates), and 20 (Phone Game)

2. Savoy and Sinn on Phone Game
3. Future and Ajax on Dates and Timebridging.

She said:

I wasn’t going to home with him that night. That would be way too soon, whether or not my
friends were there. I wouldn’t have cared if he’d asked me my number in front of them, and
neither would they. But this was fine.

I had no idea you were expecting me to jump in and suggest doing something together when you
were talking about fun things you were going to do. Do other women do that? That’s just
something I wouldn’t do.

So much thought and planning for a simple phone call! Sometimes guys are lame or have
nothing to say when they call, so at least that didn’t happen. I thought we had plans for Tuesday
and I wasn’t expecting to cancel, but I might have if I didn’t feel a connection on the phone.
What Really Happened:

When you meet a woman you should decide what your goal is. Your strategy can be flexible,
but the broad decision is whether you are going for the same night lay or the future plans. These
are not entirely different paths. For example, it’s often a good idea to get her alone or move her
to another venue even if you’re planning to close with future plans.

The “right” goal will depend partly on what you want, and partly on her logistics. If it’s her last
night in your city or she’s attached (and this doesn’t bother you), a same-night lay is usually your
best bet. If she drove with her friends and they expect her to go back with them and her friends
are not interesting in staying out, then you often have to make future plans.

Too many men don’t even consider the same night lay or don’t make a realistic attempt at it. As
Brad P and I talked about in the new interview on Taking Chances, you’re rarely going to get
“more” than you go for. So if you don’t try for the same-night lay, it won’t happen. We get
same-night lays because we try for them. We fail sometimes, we have to adjust course
sometimes, but we succeed a lot, and that’s what counts.

In any case, my intuition was that Heather wasn’t up for a same night lay. This has nothing to do
with what she just mentioned in the “she said” section. Women often have no intention of going
home with man, until “it just happened”. Rather, the situation was stacked against me. She was
with a bunch of friends on a casual Sunday night, in a non-“party”, non-sexual atmosphere (the
bar was not full of attractive people interacting with each other). She’d driven with one of her
friends. And there was nowhere obvious to move her entire group to. We were eating and
drinking at the bar, so I couldn’t move her group anywhere for food or drink. An “after party”
would be odd on a Sunday night after a couple of beers at the dive bar, especially since they all
had to work in the morning. I had my own friend with me who was visiting; not only did I not
want to be rude to him, but I’d have to account for him somehow, and he was monogamous with
his girlfriend. So I focused on making sure I’d see her again.

The phone call itself was so textbook from the “big three” resources that it’s not really crucial to
go into it here. If you’ve studied Love Systems, you know why the false time constraint is
important on the call, why you have to re-initiate attraction, how to probe for open days on her
schedule, why texting directions is better than giving them over the phone, and how and why to
get off the phone first. In terms of the date itself, you’ll know why it’s a good idea to have her
come to your house to begin the date.

Part VIII: The Date

He said:
I didn’t call or text at all on Tuesday “to confirm”. There’s no point in texting here. Calling can
be good to solidify the plans, but I was busy. I did think about what I’d do if she cancelled (not
what I’d say to her, but what I’d do instead). This is an inner game issue for me. I was raised to
keep commitments and respect other people’s time. A lot of people in California see “flaking”
as being socially okay. Fighting this gets me nowhere. So I adapt. I just arrange my life so that
if someone flakes, it’s not a big deal. I nearly always have backup plans for nights when I have a
first date. I nearly always start the date at my place (this is not only for good game reasons, but
also so if she’s late, it’s not a big deal). In the past, these things used to frustrate me. They don’t
so much anymore, and this has made me both happier and better with women.

In this case, Heather was on time. Hug and a kiss on the cheek to greet her. The date itself was
pretty straightforward, pretty much following the exact script from Chapter 16 of Magic Bullets
(I find Future and Ajax’s interview on Dates and Timebridging useful too). We took a taxi to a
nearby comedy club, which gave me the opportunity to hold her hand while leading her to the
taxi and to our table and to initiate more playful touching during the comedy acts. Going to
comedy clubs, by the way, is a great way to develop your storytelling skills and your sense of
humor; I think this is mentioned in Sinn and Future’s interview on Storytelling and Humor as
well as Magic Bullets.

After a few acts, we went for dessert. The Comfort phase is the time to solidify in her mind who
you really are (and vice versa). While the concept of identity is important, and I gave her a taste
of my identity early on in the attraction phase, you have to confirm this and deepen her
understanding of you (and yours of her) in Comfort. It’s easy to stay on the “surface” level
during dates and the comfort phase, but it won’t often help you. With many women – including
Heather – she has to feel that she’s gotten to know someone before sleeping with them.

How to flesh out your identity is covered in the interview on (you guessed it) Identity. Equally
important is the interview with myself and The Don on Using and Creating Routines. You have
to be really careful if you’re using someone else’s Identity material, and the ability to build your
own key identity routines (like your grounding routine) is crucial. We go over each phase of the
Emotional Progression Model and discuss specific routines that work well as well as how to
develop your own routines for them.

At the dessert place, she went to the bathroom. I waited a minute, and then made a phone call.
When she got back, I was talking to a friend of mine about doing some promotions for his band.
This was a real call, but of course I timed it for her to overhear the end of it. Not only did this
support my identity in a convincing way (since it was “accidental”) but it illustrated the principle
of subcommunication. Not only was I subcommunicating that I had things going on in my life,
and I wasn’t staring at the bathroom door willing it to open, but I also was able to subtly
reinforce my identity.
After desert, we went to a jazz bar near my house. We hit a high point in the conversation and I
seized that opportunity to kiss her. A couple of drinks later, I walked her back, and told her she
could only come in “for a second”. This is textbook stuff – bring her through multiple different
venues, so she feels that she’s known you for longer, and then take her back home while telling
her she can only come in for a second. This is a powerful move, since it subcommunicates that
you’re not ridiculously into her or desperate for sex. If I’d done that, it would have implicitly
lowered my value.

Once we got home…well, we’re into the end game here…

She said:

I thought the date was fun and different. I don’t think I’ve ever been taken to a comedy club
before and I can feel how it’s good for guys; you get your date all happy and laughing. It
worked with me! I wasn’t in the mood for dessert but the place was nice, truthfully you did
better with the comedy club and the jazz bar they were both darker and more romantic.

Yes of course I need to feel I need to know someone before sleeping with them. I don’t usually
sleep with someone on the first date either! [This is where she asked “do your friends read
this?”]

The kiss took me by surprise but it was a good time for it and it wasn’t weird, and some guys are
weird or nervous about it. You stopped at just the right time too.

What Really Happened:

A lot of key moves here (which is why they say “the game is played in Comfort”). I’ll list them
in bullet points:

 “Hug and a kiss on the cheek to greet her.” Started the touching early.
 “We took a taxi to a nearby comedy club”. Comedy clubs make great dates. We’ve
already pointed out where you can learn this.
 “At the dessert place, she went to the bathroom….When she got back, I was talking to a
friend of mine about doing some promotions for his band.” The tool here is
subcommunication, and the goal here is solidifying my identity.
 “We hit a high point in the conversation and I seized that opportunity to kiss her.” You
don’t want to delay the first kiss too much, because you risk that becoming the climax of
the night. The climax of the night should ideally be…well, a climax.
 “You stopped at just the right time too.” Use kissing to build, rather than kill, sexual
tension. This is a pretty advanced subject, but an important one.
Listing the resources is starting to get repetitive, but hopefully you get the idea A) that
everything that happened is something you could have done, and B) what specific resources can
help you fill in any knowledge gaps you might have.

Part IX: Seduction

He said:

Once we got back to my house, we were in the Seduction phase. I kept talking most of the way
home to distract the logical side of her brain from addressing that we were going back to my
house and that sex was a reasonable possibility there.

Once inside, I kept up the same playful conversation. I wanted a few minutes for her to be
comfortable in my environment before I took things in an overtly sexual direction. At the same
time, I made sure that our touching continued and felt natural. I wanted to avoid an awkward
situation where I’d have to “make a move”. Increasing touching and making it sexual should be
a gradual, almost imperceptible, process.

Thus, I made sure we were touching each other as we were talking, I leaned in to sniff her hair, I
had her give me a hand massage, and so on. When we kissed again, it was a natural progression
from this.

I took my time with kissing – don’t underestimate the value of being a good kisser. Kissing can
either increase or totally dissipate sexual tension. The kissing has to go on long enough to arouse
her, but not so long that it becomes boring. I try to break up lip kissing with sensual kisses on
the ear and/or neck.

We were on my couch as the kissing started to arouse her, which is when I usually escalate
things further. I decided to stay on the couch rather than trying to move her to my bedroom. She
was wearing a skirt, which meant that, technically, I didn’t have to remove a single item of her
clothing. I had already taken her shoes off, which is nearly always a good idea early in the
Seduction phase. It’s also a great indicator; if she won’t take her shoes off, this often means that
she isn’t comfortable with sexual touching.

Without getting too explicit, she was okay with the sexual progression until I tried to raise her
skirt up above her hips. She said “no”, so I stopped. I went back to her breasts, tried again a few
minutes later, and got another “no”. I tried to reach under her skirt to arouse her that way, but
she wasn’t having that either.
There are a bunch of potential solutions to this sort of roadblock– the one I ended up using was
simply to “whip it out.” Doing that and moving a woman’s hand there, while continuing to kiss,
touch and arouse her, can sometimes diminish a woman’s resistance to whatever else you are
trying to do. Like, in this case, getting the world’s tightest and most annoying skirt above her
hips.

She said:

Like I said, I don’t usually have sex on the first date. I’m not a prude or anything but it just
doesn’t go down that way. I don’t know what the point of talking a lot was, it wasn’t something
I noticed at the time, but I was pretty sure that when we got to your place that we’d be doing at
least some playing.

I wasn’t sure how far it would go, and at first I was pretty sure I wanted to keep it above the
waist. But then I didn’t care and let you do what you wanted because I was turned on and I was
comfortable with you and didn’t think you’d judge me. And if you did, it would have been your
loss!

What Really Happened:

I want to start by addressing the physical buildup. I said “I made sure we were touching each
other as we were talking, I leaned in to sniff her hair, I had her give me a hand massage, and so
on. When we kissed again, it was a natural progression from this.” This is textbook physical
escalation. It’s vital to understand how this works and to be able to escalate physical touching
“under the radar.”

I’m a bit concerned that I might not have given issues around physical touching their proper
importance in the whole Heather saga. If anything, they are just as important as the emotional
phases, and just as crucial to manage. Ask yourself if you are consistently touching (and
increasing the intensity of touch) the women you interact with in a way that they are generally
comfortable with. If the answer is no, this part of your game needs to be fixed.

Turning to the emotional side, Chapter 10 of Magic Bullets explains how the Seduction phase is
all about avoiding “state breaks”. A state break occurs when something causes a woman to
logically address the possibility that she might be putting herself in a situation that could lead to
sex.

One of the tools from Chapter 10 of Magic Bullets is the “avoid:blur:distract” model .We don’t
have space to do justice to it here. As a quick summary, avoiding, blurring, and distracting are
the three major tactics that can be used to deal with potential state breaks. Here’s one example
of each:

 “I kept talking most of the way home to distract the logical side of her brain from
addressing that we were going back to my apartment and that sex was a reasonable
possibility.” – distraction from a state break
 “We were on my couch as the kissing started to arouse her, which is when I usually
escalate things further. I decided to stay on the couch rather than trying to move her to
my bedroom.” – avoidance of a potential state break
 Doing that and moving a woman’s hand there, while continuing to kiss, touch and arouse
her, can sometimes diminish a woman’s resistance to whatever else you are trying to do.
Like, in this case, getting the “world’s tightest and most annoying skirt above her hips.”
– blurring a potential state break with another activity

There are several other examples of getting past potential state breaks in this story. Using the
model and Chapter 10 of Magic Bullets, you should be able to find these.

For a comprehensive treatment of both the emotional and the physical side of the seduction
phase, you need to check out star instructors Sinn and Tenmagnet explaining their approach to
getting a woman to “yes” on the Seduction interview.

Part X: The Relationship

He said:

I’m cheating a bit by only starting to talk about the relationship phase now. In reality, as
explained in Magic Bullets, it begins in the Comfort phase. But that would make reading and
understating everything that was happening much more complicated.

I was pretty sure as I got to know Heather that she was someone who I wanted in my life on an
ongoing basis. However, I’m not looking for something exclusive, at least not right away. So
using the Relationship Management model from Chapter 11 of Magic Bullets, this meant that my
relationship goal was either a multiple relationship (where we date each other but are free to have
equally or even more important relationships with others) or a dating/undefined situation.

This required me to establish during the Comfort phase that I had a genuine and legitimate
interest in her beyond the “here and now”. The techniques of Breakthrough Comfort are
invaluable here. So is just generally being a high-value man who is prepared to be vulnerable to
her. For a recap on what being “high-value” really means and how this works, there is no better
resource available than Future and Tenmagnet on Value.
The second part of the equation is communicating to her that I wasn’t looking for something
exclusive or monogamous. I’d stayed away from implying any hint of boyfriend-girlfriend status
in the previous phases, and had even lightly sub-communicated that there other women were in
my life, or at least had been recently. I did this a bit through the stories I told, which
occasionally involved things like “dates” or “a friend who came over to cook me dinner”.

Heather is a smart woman who knows what she wants – and my job was made a lot easier by the
fact that her own preferences easily allowed to accept my relationship goals. When she did not
react oddly to the fact that we didn’t see each other for a few days after this date (though of
course I called her the next day and used all of the other crucial post-sex techniques from
Chapter 11 of Magic Bullets), I had a good sense that we were close enough in our perspectives
that we could make our conversation explicit. And we did, and explained to each other that we
will continue to date while we date other people and we will “see what happens”. It’s a cliché
but it’s true: honesty is crucial in relationships.

She said:

It’s true, I could have gone either way on this, still I’m fine with the way things are now and I
really respect that you were upfront about what you wanted from me. It’s strange how a lot of
guys seem to think that all woman want commitment right away; most of my friends don’t have
boyfriends and don’t want a boyfriend right now.

What Really Happened:

Be careful with sub-communicating that you’re not looking for something exclusive. If you
overdo it or do it in a way that displays low social intuition, it can actually kill her attraction to
you. This happened a couple of times when I was developing the whole relationship
management model.

The best resources to learn how to sub-communicate effectively are Sinn and my interview on
Frame Control and Sub-communication, Future and Sinn on Storytelling, and Chapter 17 of
Magic Bullets.

This phase is probably the only exception to the principle at the beginning that more or less
everything I did to get to where I am now with Heather was something that could be learned
from the OAP or specific TMM products. That’s mostly because our comprehensive offering on
Relationship Management isn’t quite ready yet (it is in development).
Relationship management is a topic that doesn’t get covered very often or very well by many
dating coaches. Chapter 11 of Magic Bullets covers the subject in great depth; it’s one of the
longest chapters. It’s a related but different skill set. Until the relationship management product
is released (I should probably say “if” it is released), I am occasionally available for 1-1s or
phone consultations on this subject. Email Jeremy some information about yourself, your
situation, age, location, and what you’re looking for.

Part XI: Conclusion

Over the previous nine parts, we’ve from first seeing Heather with her friends at a local dive bar
to establishing a non-exclusive relationship with her.

Pretty much every step of the way could have learned from a combination of Magic Bullets and
the interview series audio course. I’ve mentioned before that you pretty much should have
Magic Bullets by now – you’re missing out on some pretty fundamental skills if you don’t.

Take the time now, and check out the Magic Bullets sample pack for free.

I hope you enjoyed this series. Feedback is always welcome.

Take Care,

Savoy

http://www.lovesystems.com/dating-advice/he-said-she-said-a-real-life-example