Revisiting The 3 Second Rule

Mystery’s 3 Second Rule is a standard Game tactic, and I don’t intend to overturn it with this post. Mystery had a good reason to advise men to follow the 3 Second Rule in the field: it helps a man overcome his fear of approaching women. Its singular benefit is its physicality: adhering to the rule forces a man to move toward the girl he wants to talk to, and to actually speak to her, which when executed in a short time frame has the knock-on effect of jolting a man “out of his head”. It’s that interstitial head space — that ego pacifying sanitarium of doubt and rationalization — where many a beta male are tripped up while taking their first steps on the path to romance.

So keep following the 3 second rule even as I go on to tell you it’s not necessary; if your choice is between the 3 second rule and doing nothing as the girl of your creams slips out of your life, then the choice is obvious.

In practice, I’ve found that a man really has up to a couple of minutes between eyeing a cute girl (or a cute girl eyeing him) and approaching her, without loss of face or ding of his SMV. In fact, it can improve a man’s pickup success rate to wait a little before approaching, as long as there was mutual eye contact. (There’s no point to waiting to approach a girl if she hasn’t even noticed you in the room. You’ll have to make yourself noticeable.)

The exception to the 3 second rule works within this context: You and the girl have a brief introductory volley of eyeplay from across the vast expanse of the NPI meeting room you both have crashed. Instead of immediately chomping on her eye-bait and approaching before the gleam has left either of your eyes, you wait a beat. During this interregnum to love, look at your phone or talk to someone else. Look distracted. This has the effect of raising your SMV (sexual market value — the all-important coin of the mate choice realm) relative to her SMV, and therefore rubbing her hypergamy hamster along the fur grain.

She’ll wonder, very subconsciously within the margins of her inner monologue, why you aren’t coming up to her after she tossed you her splooge of eye love, and if she hasn’t the power to tear your attention away from some other object or person of interest. She won’t have to wonder long, because you’ll make your move shortly after she’s moved to self-doubt, but you’ll have permitted just enough of a pregnant pause to linger in the space between you two for a crucial pang of morose self-assessment to squall through her ginebrain.

This girlpang is the stuff of flowering muff. A girl experiencing a hot flash of self-doubt, quick and searing and instantly relieved with your approach, will be MUCH more inviting of your charms.

This is the way seduction works; not with a bang but a simmer. If a girl is a violin, and your SMV is the bow, you aren’t hitting all her strings at once unless you’re famous and/or famously preselected by other hot women. To properly play her, you tap her strings, lightly and individually at first, each note ringing a declaration of your mate value, the occasional minor key note radiating a shivering undercurrent of her inadequacy in your presence, until all the notes converge on a covfefe crescendo.

Male SMV is like that….tiny plucked musical notes that take a woman’s emotions on a ride of pleasure, through grandiose highs and anxious lows, until vertigo has stripped her of her defenses and she wobbles into your steadying arms.