Reader Mailbag: Escaping The Small Talk Trap

It’s been too long since our last reader mailbag, so here we go. The emails have piled up to an unmanageable level, which means if you don’t see your question answered here, stay tuned for future reader mailbags.

Email #1 is from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous. The Niceguy’s Lament:

Dear CH,

They say the first step to fixing a problem is recognizing there is one. My problem is this: I’m a gamma. I’m 23, unkissed, I’m often called a nice guy and been rejected numerous times as a result. I fall into the trap of the worship/hate dichotomy of women. I catch the gaze of a lot of girls at uni, though, so I’m not all that unattractive. I’ve slowly began to realize that it’s not the women that’s the problem but myself. I have no game and hardly have the confidence to make advancements. When I do talk to girls, it’s the same old nice-guy small talk. Since reading your blog, though, I’ve hit the gym five times a week and have gained a chin and some confidence—after all, I do have a sizable cock. My question is this: is there hope for me and how do I get game? I want change.

Thanks.

First, a sizable cock is an asset…but only after you’ve seduced a woman into bed. Unless you’re in the habit of plonking your peter on the table for awestruck girls to gaze at hungrily, you won’t have any chance to leverage that asset until all the hard work is already done.

To your main gripe, what you’re suffering and feeling is the Niceguy’s Lament. You get eyeplay, but it never goes anywhere. Girls keep telling you you’re “a great guy” and it feels like a punch to the gut, because you know by now it means “a great guy who’s not drinking this milkshake”. Small talk inevitably leads nowhere, so here’s what you’ve got to do. I’ll give you a very simple instruction to follow, and all I want is for you to gauge girls’ reactions for any changes from prior experience.

Instead of the usual small talk, say this:

“Hey, I love your glasses/dress/shoes! My mom wears those too.”

That’s it. This is called “small talk with a shiv twist”, aka a neg aka a backhanded compliment. Watch closely for girls’ reactions; you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how indignant and yet, curious, they become toward you.

Do this wee babby step, and get back to us with a progress report. We’ll work on you from there.

PS Cut your gym time to three days per week. You’re either over-training, or not training hard enough in each session, given how you are able to recover so quickly for consecutive workouts.

***

Email #2: A female reader, leveledup, wants to know what to call a female shitlord.

Shivgirl names:

How about shivlet, shivstress, shivdolly, princess of the shiv, pinkpiller, or misschiv?

Thoughts? CH’s first stab at this problem was “shivlady”.

***

Email #3: Eggplantzzz tries to explain the rise of beta male thirst.

I was wondering if in the past, the “expectation” of marriage and faithfulness allowed most betas to be less desperate and made it easier for them to act like they have options. More precisely, since promiscuity wasn’t normalized and most womyn pretended to be chaste betas in a way “didn’t feel threatened” to perform, or weren’t so anxious about their status/performance.

Short answer: Yes. Options will exert their marital market leverage whether objectively available to the man or perceived as such by him. Beta male thirst is really an inverse function of real or perceived mate options; the more options, the less thirst. We are seeing record high levels of beta male thirst now because the sex market, for multiple reasons discussed at this blog, favors women; this skew doesn’t have to be large, only large enough to strongly affect the margins until there’s a huge ripple effect extending out over the entire playing field.

Beta males who feel as though marriage with an under-30, feminine, slender woman is a realistic expectation are of course less likely to litter women’s Faceborg feeds with “you go grrl!” motivationals and the tepid wayward seed of their fapped-out blue balls.

The good news is that there’s a hidden treasure waiting to be unearthed in a female-biased sexual market, for any man who has Game. The more women are clumsily hit on by anti-Game thirsty beta males, the more eagerly they’ll lap up the sexy ministrations of the aloof alpha cad who acts as if the world of women is his harem.

***

Email #4 is from Padawan, who needs advice about how to open chicks on dating apps like Tinder.

Hail lord and saviour.

Now that’s an intro I can strut in behind.

I’m a new learner on the path to the truth and I’m having a good progression but my weak point is sending the opener texts at dating apps like okcupid/tinder etc. I’m successful at dating and bedding women I meet irl , however usually I am clueless about what to say in the first message to get the chicks interested on virtual platforms. I have far less trouble with keeping the conversation and directing the topic to sex and meeting up *when* my opener gets through but that’s the only real trouble I have, it usually doesn’t get through especially when it’s with empty profiles that I have to make shit up out of blue (which I assume is the real thing that differentiates real winner alphas from the semi-betas) [ed: it can’t hurt] so I’d be grateful if you wrote a guide on how to open up with good starters for your young learners. And thank you for all your helpful articles.

Check the CH archives for online Game; there’s too much info to recap here. I’ll keep it brief, instead, to get the ball rolling for you.

Tinder/OkCupid and the rest are FEMALE ATTENTION WHORE VEHICLES. That means,

1. don’t feed their egos
2. jolt them out of their expectations that a deluge of beta male thirst is their due

Abide those two rules and your online dating adventures will feel like a spring breeze blowing through labial leaves.

In practice, these two online dating rules mean:

• be terse
• don’t be long-winded
• don’t be needy (end chats first)
• assume familiarity
• don’t get bogged down in emotional conversation
• don’t fall into the girl’s frame (always be framing)
• push-pull is your friend (push more than you would pull)
• a neg or disqualification opener right out of the gate is perfectly acceptable
• you may experiment with “going the full asshole” in the dating app milieu

Remember, the girl is chasing you; you’re not chasing the girl.

A classic PUA OkTinder opener is the following:

you’re everything I thought I never wanted in a girl

Delightfully ambiguous, something girls can’t resist. Downside: this may be played out by now. (Some of the hardcore online daters ie sluts might recognize it coming from other newbie womanizers.)

In a world of thirsty betas, the man who qualifies women right away will stand out. So try this, too:

are you cool?

Simple and direct, and however she answers, you can reply “I’ll be the judge of that.” Chicknip!

There’s the sneaky opener:

woops. i meant to swipe left

And the all-purpose birthday cat opener:

Finally, I will reveal a new tingle triggerer that is TNT, a combination of asshole + disqualification game + attention whore hamster nuking, so be careful when deploying it.

This last one is actually best used as an opener or early on, in response to nothing particularly nagger-ish  by the girl, because she’ll wonder what she’s done to earn this repudiation.

Girl: “? what i do?”

Underworld Emissary: “nothing, yet. I’m just getting it out there now and out of the way.”

PS Here’s a guy who claims to have a pickup routine that puts Tinder on “God mode”. Note the Game elements he uses: eliciting a girl’s values, intriguing a girl through storytelling, female preselection (“I’ll tell you mine that happened last night”), and a solid DQ (“it’s prob better than yours”).