Women Don’t Want You To Remember Everything About Them

A man and woman have a conversation upon meeting for the first time. During it, the man learns that the woman works for a telecom company and graduated from Wake Forest. After twenty minutes, the man decides the pickup is going well and asks for the girl’s number, offering Thursday as a good night for them to meet and continue their prelude to a rogering chat. She gives it to him but apologetically explains she’ll be busy Thursday attending a friend’s charity event. He acknowledges this obstacle and they settle on meeting Friday instead.

Friday rolls around and the man, wanting to impress the woman, regurgitates some key information she mentioned during their initial meeting. The conversation then proceeds like this:

HE: Hey, good to see you again!

SHE: You too.

HE: Must be busy working at that telecom company.

SHE: Yeah, I suppose it is.

[Five minutes later, after some more talking…]

HE: So do you know any other Wake Forest alumni in town?

SHE: There are a few.

[More blah blah-ing…]

HE: By the way, how was your friend’s charity event yesterday?

SHE: Oh, it was pretty good.

***

If the impression you got from this exchange is borderline creepy stalker vibe, you’re not alone. The guy in my above example sounds TRY-HARD. Most girls would be put off by a man laundry listing a bunch of prior conversational touchstones to force rapport. Women complain a lot about how men JUST DON’T LISTEN, but in reality they are turned off by men who listen too well. Or, more precisely, they are turned off by men who listen for the obvious, but ignore the subtext. The fact is that a high status man would not remember much of what a girl told him anyhow, so men who have poor listening skills are often quite attractive to women, at least in the early stages of a seduction. Later on, in the midst of an LTR, when a girl is yearning for signs of dependability, love and commitment, a man would be wise to occasionally remember the little details.

I’ve written before how poor listening is many men’s downfall in the comfort building stage of seduction, but as game is an art as well as science, there are qualifications to some rules. Reciting a girl’s important historical and cultural moments back to her as if she were a history book you studied for a test is going to make you sound like you are trying to impress her, which is a tingle killer if ever there was one. The key to correctly impressing women is to seem like you’re not impressing them at all. Even better is to seem like she is there to impress you, while still saying and doing those things that will subconsciously impress her. The girl above will wonder (all wondering performed in the primitive hidden recesses of the hindbrain of course) if the man has any life at all if he can so clearly remember the name of the company and the date and time of a charity event that some random girl he met just once before had mentioned to him.

More importantly, this kind of rote regurgitation is *boring*. If you are going to recall anything about a girl, make it her values or her personality quirks or her opinions on whimsical subjects. Say she told you she likes the color purple, has a bad habit of cracking her knuckles when she gets nervous, and is a thrill seeker. Now, on the followup date, a demonstration of your listening skills might go like this:

YOU: If you crack your knuckles, I’ll know that means its time for another drink to calm you down.

***

YOU: Didn’t you say your favorite color was mauve, or was it purple? I’m hoping it’s mauve, because purple is the color of kings and queens. It means you are going to be high maintenance for any man. Are you high maintenance?

***

YOU: Let’s do something crazy and go down to the river to watch the moon rise. I figure you’ve got an adventurous streak like I do.

***

Hopefully, you see the difference in how to capitalize on your efforts to listen intently to what a girl says about herself. You DO want to let a girl know you’ve remembered things she said, but it matters *which* things, and it matters how you demonstrate your powers of recall. A truly advanced seduction artist listens for themes instead of dry facts, values instead of descriptions, and he relays his knowledge of her not by repeating her self-revelations like an overjoyed kid reciting the alphabet, but by slyly hinting at what he knows about her.