Work and family demands have been keeping me busy. We’ll resume in mid-June.

This is one of the worst habits guys have. They go to a bar or club and stand side-by-side, elbow-to-elbow, and scan the room without talking to each other while holding drinks.

This conveys so many bad things. First, if you are friends with each other and even you don’t seem to find each other interesting enough to talk to, why should a stranger? Both of you automatically seem less intertesting. Second, it looks like you value meeting girls than each other. Loyalty to friends is an important aspect of female friendships, so they respect it when they see it in male friendships as well. Third, it looks like you depend on them to determine whether or not you had a good time or not while out. This is also an unattractive trait and looks like desperation. It gives the impression that the only reason you guys went out is in hopes of hooking up. Of course that’s true for 90% of the single guys who go out, but you don’t want your body language to scream such a thing either.

Talking to your friends with sincere and animated interest fixes many of these bad impressions. It shows you might be interesting people when you seem to really be caught up in talking to each other. You convey that you put your friends first. And it makes it look like you don’t base your whole self-worth on women and their attentions and don’t judge the quality of your night solely on whether or not you hooked up.

Better yet, talking to your friends is also a great way to scan the room without seeming like you’re scanning the room. You just face each other, talk, and use your peripheral vision and the view over your friend’s shoulder to gauge the quality of the room. Women are masters of this. They can seem totally engaged in conversation with friends while totally cataloguing and assessing the quality of a crowded room. This is the kind of social multitasking you need to master.

The only time self-deprecating humor is acceptable is either when it’s blatantly not true or when it’s obvious you’re a confident person and don’t really buy into what your saying on any level.

An example is a guy I knew who was musclebound and would occasionally make 98-lb weakling jokes. They would make people laugh, but they didn’t hurt him at all because you could just look at him and tell he didn’t really believe them. But another positive was that it was a subtle way to call attention to his physique without overtly bragging about it, so long as he didn’t do it very often.

One time many years ago my friend Beethoven and I were at a bar. Beethoven approached a group of two girls on his own. His line was “So what are you guys gossiping about?” Worked like a charm.

After a few minutes of banter, one of the girls then asked Beethoven what we were gossiping about. Beethoven responded “We were just saying there are way too many fat chicks up in here.” The girl’s mouth just dropped in disgust.

“That’s not right at all,” she said. She looked angry.

Unfazed, Beethoven just responded “What do you care? It’s not like you’re fat or anything.” And he just kept on going. They ended up having a great conversation and exchanging numbers.

A lot of guys would have tried to apologize in some form the minute they were called out. “Oh, what I meant was…” or “I was just kidding…” or “I’m sorry, what I meant was…” Kiss of death. It’s a test and apologizing would have been a failure of that test.

If you spill your drink on a person or act in a bad manner toward them, you should definitely apologize. If you are cheating on your lover, you should definitely apologize. Those are actions. But thoughts you can’t help, and those shouldn’t be apologized for (although sometimes they shouldn’t be shared either). So while the man who sleeps with other women behind his woman’s back should apologize because he committed a wrong action, the man who merely finds other women attractive shouldn’t (so long as he’s tasteful about it) because it’s merely a thought he’s never intended to act upon.

One of the biggest mistakes men make with women is to think the best way to form a major bond with them is to make them consistently and unbearably happy. This works for the short run and it creates affection and a degree of appreciation, but eventually there will be boredom.

Because men are so much more visual and physical in their tastes, good looks and hot sex can often be enough to keep them excited and passionate about their woman. But for women, one of the major keys to intense passion is creating the emotional rollercoaster. Emotions are like a hard drug to a woman.

Women love experiencing a wide range of emotions and on a deep level, even if they’re bad emotions. Think of the movies women flock to. They love happy movies that provide escapism but they’ll also flock to movies designed to scare them and most telling, they’ll flock to sad movies to cry. If you tell a guy, “Hey, check out this movie. It will really make you feel like shit and bawl like a baby,” he’ll be like “Uhhh, I’ll pass.” For a woman, however, being made to feel shitty and cry is actually draws them to see a movie. They’ll even emphasize the depression and crying as one of the best parts of the movie, especially if the movie ends on an uplifting note, which enhances the psychic whiplash of the emotional rollercoaster even more.

This is why makeup sex is so powerful. As a guy, the first time you experience it it’s mind-boggling. That your woman can go in a split-second from being seething mad at you to giving you the most intense passionate sex of your life is due to this principle.

UPDATE: Commenter Damon below added a great point

The only point I would add to this is make sure YOU are the one taking HER on an emotional roller coaster, you have to keep your self-control at all times. If you let her take you on an emotional roller coaster aka dating someone who is a drama queen or even worse, bipolar or mentally ill, you will be miserable.

This is very true. In the post I wasn’t explicitly advocating all men run out and try to create emotional rollercoasters all willy-nilly. I just wanted to explain the concept so that men could recognize it when it happens.

However if you do try to create an emotional roller-coaster reader, you better damn well make sure you know the woman you are dealing with is not psychotic, and you also better make damn sure that you have a good chance of ending the rollercoaster on a positive emotional high endpoint rather than a negative one.

Especially the more prolonged it is. If a touch is truly unintentional and meaningless from a woman, she’ll instantly and quietly recoil. Women are very conscious about who they allow themselves to touch, when they can touch them and for how long to let the touch last.

Because of how society judges and shames women for being sluts if they are too overt and forthcoming about their sexual desires, they learn to express interest much more covertly. A move that from a man would not be as big a deal, like a light touch on the arm, carries much more weight when a woman is bold enough to do it.

So if a woman has reached the point where she’s allowing herself to touch you repeatedly and for prolonged periods, she’s intentionally sending you what is in her mind an unambiguous message.

Attractive women get offered sex all the time in a hundred different ways, just for leaving the house and looking decent.

Since attractive women are offered dick so often, they have a surplus of choices, meaning they have to engage in random arbitrary downgrades a lot of the time to narrow the choices down. This is why you often hear women turn down guys for what seem like silly, petty reasons: “He was an inch too short,” “I didn’t like his shoes,” “He was wearing Eurotrash looking True Religion jeans from 2001,” or whatever. I don’t blame them. If I was bombarded with choices I’d need to find more and more novel ways to thin the herd of applicants too.

With most men however, attractive or not, being offered sexual interest is like Christmas in July. It’s such a rare and fortunate anomaly. For this reason, men often do the opposite of women and try to find random arbitrary reasons to upgrade. “I’ve seen worse.” “From this angle, which is the back of the head, she looks kind of looks like Scarlett Johannsen.” “She’ll do until something better comes along.” “She’s got great tits and a decent ass.” They’re afraid to reject sexual interest because it’s rare, they have no idea when it will come again in such an unambiguous fashion and they are afraid to waste it when it is there.

This is what I call the Interest Only Upgrade, or the I.O.U. I.O.U. chicks are the chicks you normally wouldn’t want anything to do with but talk yourself into sleeping with or dating mainly because they’re willing to sleep or date you. A lot of men think they’re getting over by adding I.O.U. chicks to their roster. After all, they’re easy to get with and there’s less risk of rejection. The men feel on the higher end of the power dynamic then usual, which is another pro.

But there are a lot of hidden cons in an I.O.U. chick. First, there’s a chance you end up finding enough nice things about the I.O.U. chick, especially in her personality, that make you want to keep her despite the fact you aren’t that attracted to or excited by her. You keep her around because you get to know her and develop feelings for her. Maybe she gives you a relationship ultimatum and because you’ve grown comfortable, don’t want to cut off the sex gravy train and have no other options on the horizon you begrudgingly cave in.

This is bad because it creates a situation where you’re settling and only partly satisfied with your mate. It’s not fair to yourself and it’s especially not fair to the I.O.U. chick, who deserves a chance to be with someone who fully wants and appreciates her rather than someone who mainly upgraded her to fuckable and datable just for the fact that she showed extra interest.

The second hidden con in an I.O.U. chick is that while you’re getting over in the short run, in the long run you are subconsciously sending yourself bad messages. You’re telling yourself “This is the best I can do. This is the best I deserve.” And because you on a certain level aren’t satisfied with her, the thought that she’s the best you can do always aggravates you on some level and causes you to resent her and mistreat her as a result. A lot of men I meet who constantly mistreat their women verbally, emotionally or by recklessly and flagrantly cheating on her in a humiliating disrespectful way are often doing it because their girlfriend or wife started out as an interest-only chick they settled for. This also is unfair to the I.O.U. chick.

Once you accept an I.O.U. chick into your life, even if you tell yourself you’re going to just go on one date or two and try to get sex and leave, you always run the risk of liking her more than you expected and keeping her around just because it’s easy and comfortable. Then you end up in a limbo relationship, one that is not awful enough to leave but not good enough to inspire you to work your hardest at it.

I did a series of posts on the Madonna/Whore complex. Basically, a lot of men out there want their women to be as perfect as their mom apparently was. Unfortunately, even their actual moms wouldn’t live up to this ideal if their sons knew everything about them. Your mom make have sucked her share of dicks. Your mom may have cheated on boyfriends or your dad in her past. Your mom may have had a wild phase. Your mom may have slept with a married man once or stole another girl’s boyfriend. Your mom may have done her share of mean, manipulative things to your dad that you never saw. Your mom probably masturbated or had impure thoughts.

The problem with evaluating your mom is that a certain image of her has been imprinted in you from a young age and it becomes hard to outgrow. Your mom always seems to know when you’re lying or did something wrong, so you think she’s all-knowing. But the truth is you were a stupid little kid. Any reasonable adult would know when you were lying or did something wrong. She wasn’t omniscient, you were just young and obvious. She always was sympathetic to your whining and willing to fight your battles for you or tell you what to do and pick up after you. But she’s your mother, and she’s been doing it for you since the days you were too young to do it for yourself, so it’s to be expected. She probably wasn’t as patient and blindly supportive with your dad as she was with you when you were a kid. Your mom always forgave you and listened to your flimsy excuses and bailed you out from negative confrontation with male rivals, usually your dad if you want to get extra-Freudian about it.

What happens is that men get this perfect madonna images of their mother imprinted on them from a young age, and grow up into adult men who never dispel this mythical image. So they judge the actual flesh-and-blood women they meet for being, in comparison to this supposed madonna their mothers were, too sexual, too unwilling to listen to them whine, too unwilling to bail them out of confrontation with other males, too unwilling to forgive them for everything and eat up all their flimsy excuses.

What usually happens at this point is that after some ups and downs in the dating world, they settle on relationships where they’re in some kind of mother-son dynamic. The black community is especially afflicted with these mother-son dynamics because of the amount of fatherless young men, especially in the ghetto. The mother-son dynamic leads to a whole host of unique dysfunctions, which may be the subject of another post one day.

But the main point is, only your mom can live up to your mom ideals. And secretly, even she probably couldn’t if you knew all her secret thoughts, desires and actions. Stop punishing women for not being as virginal as you believe they should be. Stop expecting women to listen to you whine all day and wipe your tears. Don’t expect women to just unconditionally buy all your bullshit and pick up after you. Don’t expect women to bail you out of trouble, especially when it requires facing another male.

Don’t look for an impossible ideal. Look for a real human being, with all the human flaws that inevitably come with one.

Don’t Overcompensate and Become An Abusive Bully, Tyrant or a Robot

cjb left the following comment in response to Day 8 of the 31 days:

At the age of 54 I’ve finally realized the belief about it being impolite is, for the most part, wrong.
Women respect men who say what they think and feel, as long as it’s not cruel, gratuitously mean, or shows a lack of self confidence that they feel they cannot overcome.
Women like to be told where they are going to go, where they are going to eat, etc., but there is a fine line between bossing or being overbearing and showing you know your own mind.
If you haven’t, read his old article “How to be the perfect woman.” Then read it. Then read it over and over, especially the part about how women suss out their problems as opposed to the way men do.
It’s key to why this works.
Women have a constant tennis match in their head that goes on without a judge. The ball goes back and forth constantly. As men, we are relied upon to stop the tennis match, at least for a while. This is why this works.
If it doesn’t work the first time, the woman will still respect you and it will eventually work.
If you take this tact and the woman turns cold or doesnt respect you, you didn’t have a chance in the first place for anything more than a “friendship” and it’s time to move on.

This is one of the most important things to convey, and the thing I think objectors miss when reading my advice. When I say “Make decisions,” that doesn’t mean I’m recommending you to take away someone else’s options. Just to be decisive about what you want. The other person still has room to negotiate and sway you, but the point is you avoid that dance of “I dunno, what do you want to do?”

When I say to “tell, don’t ask,” that doesn’t mean bark orders at a woman or do it in a rude, crass or snarky way. Even if she shuts you down, at least you sounded confident and self-assured, which made a good impression. Remember, it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.

When I say advise you to accept anything a woman gives you and don’t be afraid to give her errands when she offers to run some for you, this does not mean you go overboard and become a slavedriver barking orders at her and looking for errands and chores to unload on her. It just means that you give her the chance to be useful to you, which is important to any good woman.

When I say your woman can’t be your best friend and confidante doesn’t mean you go so far as to show no emotional vulnerability and refuse to share anything at all for fear of being weak. You can show moments of weakness; you just can’t indicate that you are chronically helpless.

The key is that you’re supposed to inspire confidence and bring feelings of security not fear and resentment. But many guys, when they feel they’ve been sold a bad bill of good throughout their lives and realize they’ve grown up to be beta males held in contempt by most women, go through this thing where they overcompensate. If they feel everyone walked all over them up until now and they were too much of a pushover with people, now they’re going to make sure that they check any disrespect right out of the gate even if it’s imaginary or unintentional, and they’re going to check that disrespect with an over the top response. They lose any ability to pick and choose battles or use the appropriate level response to suit the transgression.

Don’t be an overcompensator. Don’t convince yourself you hate beautiful women or powerful men in general just because you perceive many did you wrong at points in your life. Don’t become overvigilant and paranoid about getting “punked” to the point you alienate people and cause them to walk on eggshells around you. A person is who constantly paranoid about looking strong and invincible all the time over time starts looking as weak as the person who is constantly allowing himself to be a doormat: both become defined and consumed by their weakness until their weaknesses become their defining trait.

The whole point of this is to make the woman in your life feel happy and secure thanks to your leadership and steadiness, not feel terrorized of saying the wrong thing and feeling oppressed thanks to your insecure bullying. Whenever you read any advice on this blog, keep this in mind.