The Fine Line Between Icky Beta And Alluring Alpha

There are some aspects of Game that qualify more as art than science. Everything is reducible, but the poetic oscillations of life most strongly defy digestible truncation. Seduction has those poetic parts that emotionally resonate but yield little to logical examination that the limbic system hasn’t already deduced.

This came to mind in a recent post about a reader who tried to pique the curiosity of a hindquarter-flaunting attention whore over (I presume) Tinder. I gave him some advice, but in the end he lost her with this line:

i fucked up by asking her “isnt it past your bedtime?”. the broad didnt reply

As I explained to him, I would’ve warned him (if I knew ahead of time) that that line was a tingle stopper. Girls hear that and think “creepy beta trying to keep me up all night talking sex”.

But why, exactly, is that line icky to girls, but a similar line that is CH-approved —

“go to sleep stalker. i’ve gotta get up tmrw”

— is alluring to girls?

We can all feel in our bones how awful that first line is, but what precisely is it in that combination of words in the original iteration that curdles cooch? If chatting with Tinder girls is an art impregnable to deeper scrutiny, how is a man supposed to know what will work and won’t work?

I’m about to ¡SCIENCE! this bitch all up in here. The first line – “isn’t it past your bedtime?” – suffers from two pussy-parching flaws:

1. It’s a question asked far too early in the interaction (immediate questioning puts the man in the unsexy chaser role, begging for scraps of info from the girl)
2. The word choice, and the innuendo ejaculating from the sentence, trigger a girl’s anti-slut defense system. She hears “bedtime” and thinks “sexytime”. She also feels the question implies she’s staying up just for him. Nothing wrong with assuming the sale, unless you pull that card too soon and without sufficient confidence in your hand.

The second line – “go to sleep stalker. i’ve gotta get up tmrw” – solves these problems. It’s a statement, not a question. And it avoids ASD-triggering sex words. It also assumes the sale, but less cloyingly; the facetious “stalker” accusation is a false disqualification that makes girls’ hearts race. The second line insinuates that the man is the “chasee”, and that perception influences how she will feel toward him (intrigued), but the insinuation is couched in a cocky jerkboy dismissal rather than a yearning horny inquiry.

On a whiteboard, the two lines aren’t all that substantively different. But in the realm of pickup, seemingly trivial word choices can accelerate, or blow up, a rolling seduction.