My date kicked me hard in the shin under the table. I was gazing at her cleavage into her eyes, so she must have wanted my attention.
“Ow! What’d you do that for? You hit the bone.”
She leaned forward over her entree and put her hand up to her cheek to shield her face from possible lip readers.
“See that couple sitting next to us? Don’t look over! Just listen to their conversation.”
I suffered grievous injury because she wanted me to eavesdrop on a conversation. Goddamn, chicks really love inserting themselves into the drama of other people’s lives. I looked over. A man in his late 20s, neatly if blandly dressed in a button-down and slacks like a freshly pressed widget off the yuppie assembly line, was seated across from an attractive MILF-y brunette who appeared a few years older than him. She had that frozen grin on her face that people get when they are listening to someone talk and trying to seem interested.
“What am I supposed to be listening for?”
“Just listen!”
It wasn’t hard to do. The man was talking incessantly, and loudly, punctuating important points with open-palmed axe chops of his hands, like a politician giving a stump speech. His face was animated and he thrust his head forward in his date’s direction for emphasis, as if he believed what he was saying was handed down to him from the heavens and she would soon be converted. And what was he saying that merited such self-enthusiasm? Tales from work. Name dropping. And, I shit you not, stock movements.
I moved closer to whisper to my date over glasses of wine. “He’s talking about his job. Kind of a bore. But an excitable bore, like a small child. Maybe he just got a new gig and he thinks he’s suddenly a member of the ruling elite. That could make anybody a bore.”
“I know, a total dud! He won’t stop talking. He’s not letting her get a word in. Listen, he keeps cutting her off.”
It was true. He would breathlessly regale her for what seemed an eternity and she would try to gamely interrupt with a “Yeah, it’s true. That’s like…”, and he would cut her off with a hyperactively blunt “Right!” that may as well have been shouted through a bullhorn into her face, before continuing where he left off. This cycle would repeat itself through the course of the night, each passing minute eliciting a more pinched expression from the woman.
“Hey, at least he sounds like he has a good job, mingling with power brokers,” I said half-facetiously. “And he’s not bad looking. Any woman would be happy with such a catch.”
My date smirked at me dubiously. “Yeah, right. Look at that poor woman. She’s in pain. She wants to get away from him but she’s stuck.”
“Maybe she could excuse herself and escape through the bathroom window.”
“You’ve done that, haven’t you?”
“Come on now, I’m not that kind of guy. I leave through the kitchen.”
She listened some more. “There’s no way she’s seeing him again. Name dropping! That is so lame. This is a first date and she’ll be relieved to get out of here. He’ll try to call her but she’ll ignore him.”
“Oh, I don’t know. She’s getting up there. She might be thinking that’s the best she can do.”
“You’re such a jerk sometimes. I feel bad for her. Lucky for her she won’t see him again.”
“You seem happy about this love connection failure.”
“Yes. We women are very sympathetic to other women sitting through bad dates. We understand what it’s like. There’s nothing worse than a guy who won’t shut up.”
“Even if he has a lot to talk about?”
“Especially if! Leave a little mystery. You didn’t tell me anything on our first date. Lord knows why I saw you again. Anyhow, guys who dominate conversations are probably bad lovers. Selfish and controlling. They don’t care who you are, they just want a pretty face hanging on their words.”
“I just want a pretty face unzipping my fly.”
“Do you always have to be so immature?”
“Yes, Auntie Pink Snappy.”
******
We’ve talked here about the problem of being tongue-tied in the presence of women. A scarcity of speech is the biggest issue for the majority of men. But we shouldn’t forget the mirror image of this attractiveness-killing ineptitude: the nonstop talker. The motor mouth. A significant minority of men — particularly greater betas and lesser alphas on the cusp of making a mark in the world — suffer from the second problem: they don’t know when to shut up and let the woman speak, enamored as they are with their blossoming manhood and acquirement of conventional male attractiveness traits.
Talking too much fails on multiple dimensions: it increases the odds you’ll say something dull or beta, it strips away mystery, and it demonstrates a lack of interest in the woman’s values and desires. It also shows you don’t truly understand women, for a harangue about your accomplishments, social climbing, materialism, or connections is a red flag to women that you are an insecure, approval-seeking mediocrity, no different than the thousands of other men dancing like monkeys for a pretty woman’s attention. Harangues are especially off-putting to women when the subject matter is devoid of emotional resonance, as most men’s shop talk would be.
And why do women despise male suck-ups? Well, because women in their natural state rarely seek the approval of any man except the most dominant ones, they become confused and irritable when men for whom they might grant sexual access seek their approval. They don’t subconsciously apprehend why a man would work SO HARD for her endorsement. What has she brought to the table in a few seconds that would catapult her to superstar status by her doting date?
Oh yeah, tits and ass. But that doesn’t alter the disgust women feel for lapdogs and credential burnishers. Sure, they may recognize on some deep limbic level that T&A revs men’s engines, but their own psychological latticework is not constructed of male body parts, and so they don’t project a female fascination with the body onto men. What they project instead is a female fascination with a man’s personality and character. I.e., his alphaness. Thus, they expect men to think and feel the same way about women. They wonder why he talks so much when he should be connecting with her.
On the contrary, a man who has his inner shit together, who feels pretty damned good about himself, won’t be impelled to talk ad nauseam about his alpha fortune. His relaxed, cocky demeanor is his best advertisement.
The vignette above is by no means exceptional. You see this sort of dynamic all the time if you go out to places where lots of couples go for dates. It should be heartening to the readers of this blog that the vast majority of men simply have NO CONCEPT WHATSOEVER of how to properly arouse a woman. Fully 90%+ of the world’s men do not run any active game.
It’s even worse than that. Of those 90%, at least half run ANTI-GAME, like the man in the above situation. Observe people on dates and you’ll see a lot of men shooting themselves in the foot. It’s a wonder the species manages to propagate itself, but male persistence — and relatively faster female aging out of sexual viability — sometimes conspire to get a woman to open her legs.
I remember a while back I had taken a couple of E tabs with a female friend. We spent a sleepless weekend hanging out and elevating our mental states. The E tabs pranked my brain into loquacity. I talked and talked. Verbal diarrhea. So did she, but she had not reacted to the pills the same way I had, and she hadn’t consumed as much. As a result, her awareness of presence was sharper than mine. Toward the end of the weekend bender, pre-withdrawal, her demeanor had changed. She was zoning out, and crabby. Everything seemed to rub her the wrong way. Only in hindsight did I hit upon the reason for the change in her temperament. She was driven to peevishness by my excessive talking.
Women may say they want a man who shares his feelings, and who tells her things about himself, but the truth — as is often the case at the disjunct between women’s words and actions — is that women love laconic men. Men who don’t say much. Men whose default programming is to shut up rather than open up. When these men do deign to speak, women hang on their words.
Women want an EF Hutton man. When EF Hutton speaks, women listen. Be an EF Hutton man.
The next time you’re on a date, remind yourself to stop talking. Step outside the moment for a second and, like a third party observer floating off to the side, focus your mind on the interaction. Listen to yourself. Are you a blabbermouth? Apply the brakes to your brain. Let it cool off. Lean back and allow her to engage you for a change. Her hindbrain will thank you.
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