The Game
MEN WEREN’T REALLY THE ENEMY—
THE FIRST PROBLEM FOR ALL OF US,
After approaching the group, he continued, the key is to ignore the woman you desire while winning over her friends—especially the men and anyone else likely to cockblock. If the target is attractive and used to men fawning all over her, the pickup artist must intrigue her by pretending to be unaffected by her charm. This is accomplished through the use of what he called a neg. (View Highlight)
Neither compliment nor insult, a neg is something in between—an accidental insult or backhanded compliment. The purpose of a neg is to lower a woman’s self esteem while actively displaying a lack of interest in her—by telling her she has lipstick on her teeth, for example, or offering her a piece of gum after she speaks. (View Highlight)
“The number one characteristic of an alpha male is the smile (View Highlight)
So I went to the source and bought books by Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the University of California professors who developed and popularized this fringe school of hypnopsychology in the 1970s. (View Highlight)
“There’s a way,” I told her, “that you can bring better focus to your goals and your life.” I felt like Grimble in T.G.I. Friday’s.
According to Mystery, it takes roughly seven hours for a woman to be comfortably led from meet to sex. (View Highlight)
Waiting seven hours or more is what Mystery calls solid game. But occasionally a woman either goes out with the specific intention of taking someone home, or can be easily led to sex in a shorter amount of time. Mystery calls this fool’s mate. (View Highlight)
there is no such thing as failure, only learning lessons. (View Highlight)
The PUAs have a name for this: They call it one-itis. It’s a disease AFCs get: They become obsessed with a girl they’re neither dating nor sleeping with, and then start acting so needy and nervous around her that they end up driving her away. The cure for one-itis, PUAs like to say, is to go out and have sex with a dozen other girls—and then see if this flower is still so special. (View Highlight)
Fear seizes hold in your chest first. It clamps gently to the top of the heart, like a vice made of rubber. Then you really feel it. Your stomach churns. Your throat closes. And you swallow, desperately trying to avoid the dryness and hoping that when you open your mouth, a confident, clear voice will emerge. Even after all my training, I was terrified.
Mystery calls it dynamic social homeostasis. We are constantly buffeted about by, on one hand, our overwhelming desire to have sex with a girl and, on the other, the need to protect ourselves when approaching. The reason this fear exists, he says, is because we are wired evolutionarily for a tribal existence, where everyone in the community knows when a man is rejected by a woman. He is then ostracized and his genes, as Mystery puts it, are unapologetically weeded out of existence. (View Highlight)
One of the tragedies of modern life is that women as a whole do not hold a lot of power in society, despite all the advances made in the last century. Sexual choice, however, is one of the only areas where women are indisputably in control. It’s not until they’ve made a choice, and submitted to it, that the relationship is inverted—and the man is generally back in a position of power over her. Perhaps that is why women, to the frustration of men everywhere, are so cautious about saying yes. (View Highlight)
And it was by watching Mystery win over Natalija that I learned this lesson.
“There are no ugly women; only lazy ones.” (View Highlight)
When I asked her about it, she burst into tears. “I gave it up too fast,” she sobbed. “Now I’m never going to see you again.”