This new series seems to have gone down well so I have endeavoured to squeeze more blood from the stone that is Jimmy. The text is all his, and the footnotes are mine.

Qu. Where is the line between working a girl’s attraction switches and losing the frame and being a needy pleaser?

This is a question I really like that I saw in the comments of that last post. It’s also a debate I had with a coaching client I had a few weekends ago. He really pushed me well on it and I wasn’t convinced I had answered well enough to suit him, so seeing this in the comments was like a second chance for me to make my case.

The argument I am getting goes something like this: ‘You say you adapted your game depending on the girl’s preferences, but aren’t you supposed to be a man who is on the path to his true self and not simply trying to please the girl?’

Again, I am no authority, nor am I trying to sell myself as one [1]. I’m just an old dog with a lot of data under my belt and you might be half my age. So, just in my opinion and from what I have experienced I’d say yes to both. Yes you are a man who follows his path, sticks to his guns and knows his own mind and this will be attractive. Faltering from this in front of a target is more often than not going to be seen as a stumble. Changing to suit her (certainly in the early/attraction stages of the courtship) is probably going to be seen as rapport-seeking and possibly even as a show stopper.

But this is more about lying or subduing your true self and misrepresenting your path or important core beliefs. I don’t advocate you do that.

 

I remember once being on a date, I can’t remember where or who with, but I remember the moment, that at some point we got into that discussion about girls taking adequate steps to make sure they don’t get attacked or raped. The old analogy ‘if you leave your watch on a park bench unguarded for a day, of course it’s not right that someone stole it, but you also need to learn to protect yourself more adequately in future’.

Now this idea that a girl ‘should be able’ to walk in a short skirt through Finsbury Park at midnight on her own and not get attacked is adolescent to the point of dangerous [2]. We should all be able to do a lot of things, but we can’t because there are bad people in the world. We need to protect ourselves like responsible adults, not talk like 12 year olds. Of course, you all know this.

And so I made this exact case. And the girl got very angry. She shouted at me about how that was a disgusting attitude and then she claimed her friend got raped and it is never the victim’s fault, blah blah blah.

So what did I do? I immediately consulted my copy of Daygame Mastery (I take it with me everywhere, especially on dates and job interviews) and I simply stuck to my guns. I don’t cow to skirt. I looked her right in the eye and told her sternly (in a Geordie accent I’d picked up from studying Daygame Overkill) that I was sorry to hear about her friend but that I don’t choose best practices based on highly emotional, subjectively preferential situations. If anyone ever encouraged my daughter or my niece to behave recklessly, they’d be getting a boot up their arse for the danger they would be putting her in. I was of course 100% happy for her to storm off.

Bringing highly emotive personal experiences into political discussions is also one of my core dislikes. I’m not going to bow to it. We’ve all been in situations where we’re desperate and we expect the world to stop turning and come to our aid. When my nephew was ill, my personal belief was that everyone in the country should stop what they were doing and focus 100% on helping him get better, until he got better. Was that doctor walking a bit too slowly? He should be threatened with dismissal. Was that nurse acting a little bit too relaxed? Get him his own personal physician immediately who will take it seriously, hang the expense, the taxpayer can afford it.

In the heat of personal fear and desperation that’s what we demand, but it’s delusional to think that any of this is in any way sustainable or possible and to ever bring into practice across a population.

I was never going to back down and try to appease her. I’d be betraying what I truly felt and in all honesty, I just didn’t want to. I’d rather burn the date than ever have to do that. I’ve walked away from dates in the past when girls have started hinting at feminist talking points. I’ve just gotten up and walked out. (It’s very satisfying. Try it. Life’s too short to try to manage damaged people). They’re doing me a favour by letting me know early on what I am getting myself into, so that I can walk away and save myself the hassle.

So anyway, in this particular situation, she calmed right down, looked thoughtful and said that I had a fair point. I guess I got lucky. It could have gone the other way and at times has been. The upside to this behaviour now though is that she knows that when I speak, I speak the truth. I kicked that door right down.

But when I talk about tailoring DHVs or working out who she is and acting accordingly, none of this is a perversion of our deep true selves or a bending of our core masculine beliefs in the face of a mere whimsical feminine shit test. It’s just about working out what parts of your complex personality and personal attributes are most appealing to her.

Imagine you’re the proprietor of a fish restaurant. You pride yourself on your fish. Meat is for Mop Heads. In fact, that’s the name of your restaurant. If a customer came in and demanded a pork chop, you’d throw him out. You’re a fish restaurant. It’s fish or it’s fuck off. What I am talking about is working out if someone is into a healthy eating or not, then when you work that out, you know whether you want to tell him about your fish salad menu, or instead about your deep fried fish menu.

I love my girlfriend and I would never have ended up with her if I’d led the set with a story about how I can’t ever return to a certain European country because when I was 20 I got prosecuted for breaking some guy’s nose at a party and my defence strategy in court was to simply not show up. Ha ha ha. Bad ass me, right? Yes she knows now, but there’s a time and a place for disclosing your flaws. [3]

No I worked out her values, I looked where our values matched and, amongst other things, I led with those.

Now you may disagree (and please feel free to in the comments below, let’s get a healthy debate going), but trying to smash down someone who is more ‘K’ with the same ‘r’ selected game time after time will, I think, will limit your results. You have to work out what is appealing to this particular girl. Is she attracted to the dark and mean or the silly and playful? Is she bored of the banker and dentists she always meets or does she crave stability? These aren’t your core values; it’s just some of the many facets of your complex personality, good and bad. Being K doesn’t necessarily mean ‘beta provider’ any more than being r doesn’t necessarily mean alpha. You can be a bad boy by smashing some teeth in but for some girls you can hit that switch by simply having a saucy sense of humour.

A few years ago I was dating two girls who were at the opposite sides of this r/K spectrum. One being very ‘r’ and the other very ‘K’. I listened to their attitudes to the same topics to work out their contrasting personal values. For example on the subject of their education:

‘I’ll stay out and drink more; it’s the stupid lectures tomorrow anyway, I never go on Fridays!’

‘My parents work hard to pay for me to go to school. To not turn up would be the most I could ever do to disrespect them. I would never do that’.

As you know ‘r’ means you’re probing for things like dysfunction, sloppiness, carelessness, tardiness, carefree, tumultuous family relationships, smoking, drinking, poor future planning, lack of appreciation of others and easy sexual talk. If you’re finding this, you’ve probably got an ‘r’.

K is all the opposite. Think of tidiness, clean living, respectfulness, future planning, family values, etc. [4]

The point of all this isn’t that ‘K’s take a long time and ‘r’s take a short time to seduce. It’s that you should take the time you need to work out what you’re dealing with and thus choose your bonding conversations accordingly.

There’s a fine line between the rule ‘don’t lie’ and the balancing of your natural ‘r’ and ‘K’ tendencies. That’s another blog post, but for me maybe I was happy to be ‘r’ until I found the girl it was worth being ‘K’ for.

20 years ago I didn’t know what r/K was, but I had an idea. I used to refer to it in my head as ‘the slut spectrum’, which was simply r/K without the scientific understanding. Some girls were fast and loose, some went to church. These different types tended to respond to different behaviours. The fast and loose loved it when I acted like Keith Richards and caused a fuss in the student union, but the non-sluts would think I was a try hard tool if I did this and I would never hear from them again. They liked their bad boy served up to them a little more sophisticated. I’d observe girls, listen to them and ask about the things that would draw out these values. As I sussed them out I’d flick those switches accordingly.

Talk about her family, her father, her attitude to school, work and the future. It will tell you everything you need to know and then you choose your behaviour accordingly. I like to spar with my friends and play rough. I also like to make silly videos with my niece and put them on YouTube (don’t bother lads, you’ll never find them, I’m not that daft).

Here are two different responses you could choose to the same question. ‘What was your best moment this Christmas?’

‘I don’t know about best moment but definitely a really good one was when I went into an old bar I used to knock around when I was younger. Roughest bar in town…. back then. Once in there I saw this guy I used to know. Brendan Taylor. There were two of them, the Taylor twins. Proper bad eggs. When we were in our 20s we used to hate to hate each other me and Brendan. We’d knocked the shit out of each other. We had a feud going back to when I’d dated his cousin. One night we both fell through a window in a club and we nearly ended in court. He saw me and for a minute I thought we were going to end up falling out, but we just started laughing. We got talking. We ended up sitting there for an hour and having a laugh’.

‘Being in a traffic jam for 6 hours. No seriously, you wouldn’t believe it. It was the car journey on the motorway up to Manchester on the 23rd. I had a train ticket but at the last minute my dad told me he could give me a lift up from London. There was a traffic jam on the way and it took us 6 hours to get home but we just talked about stuff. We had a great talk. My dad’s getting older now and I don’t get to see him much these days so 5 hours is a pot of gold. We stopped off at the services and had dinner. It was really good.’

Both these are stories of things that have happened to me and my selecting one over the other isn’t in any way a betrayal of any of my core values, rapport seeking or even any kind of contradiction. But you could see how they would have different effects on different people. We are all complex characters. We can be tough, we can be cruel, we can be careless, we can be caring, we can be kind, we can be crazy. I want to know what she responds to best and show her those sides of my personality.

If you’d like to ask Jimmy a question, leave it in the comments below and perhaps he’ll answer. If you’d like to ask me a question I can be hired for the small sum of £1,000 per day, payable in two manageable instalments of £500, in advance. If that paltry fee is beyond you, consider my products here, which answer many questions you’d have never thought to even ask.

[1] That’s what I do.
[2] And this is long before London became a shithole full of imbecile Africans and Arabs.
[3] What is a DHV to one girl may be a DLV to another.
[4] Contrary to the latest working definition of K as “a girl who I failed to shag on the first date.”