Listening is a key ingredient of tight game. Sounds simple, but the simplicity of it is belied by the millions of men who can’t stay focused on the actual words coming out of a girl’s mouth. Who can blame them? A heaving rack can distract any man with a functioning libido, (slouching SWPLs’ Herculean listening abilities thus explained), and, let’s face it, most women don’t have much interesting to say when they’re talking about themselves, which, as this study shows, is most of the time.
Talking about ourselves—whether in a personal conversation or through social media sites like Facebook and Twitter—triggers the same sensation of pleasure in the brain as food or money, researchers reported Monday.
About 40% of everyday speech is devoted to telling others about what we feel or think. Now, through five brain imaging and behavioral experiments, Harvard University neuroscientists have uncovered the reason: It feels so rewarding, at the level of brain cells and synapses, that we can’t help sharing our thoughts.
Yep, chicks like to talk about themselves. Men do to, but I’ll bet good money that women are worse offenders. (This study apparently didn’t control for sex.) Anyhow, the fact remains that when women are talking about themselves to you, they are getting the same pleasurable high they would get from eating a pint of ice cream or buying a new pair of shoes. Explains a lot.
Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to listen so effectively, or to simulate the behavior of listening effectively, that the girl you are seducing feels comfortable enough revealing herself to you that she can’t stop yapping and inducing those natural dopamine highs which will then get anchored to you. It’s just a hop skip and pump away from sex at that point.
Randall Parker asks:
Okay, she feels great talking about herself. But does it make sense to just let her? Or can one be more clever with the use of this insight? Ideas:
– ask her about herself in ways that drive her thinking in directions you want her thinking to go.
– reward desired behavior with questions about herself.
– other?
During the comfort stage of a seduction, the woman wants to feel a “connection” with the man. The easiest way to build this connection, (or to construct a convincing simulacrum of a connection), is to let her talk and nod your head every so often, peppered with the occasional “uh huh” and “right”, and repeating random words she spoke back to her. Women have an amazing capacity for exaggerating these tiny symbolic gestures of male attentiveness into something romantically significant, so it would be a sin for you, the aspiring womanizer, to look this gift ho in the mouth.
But as RP suggests, allowing a woman to yap in perpetuity will, after a certain threshold of one-sided conversation has been crossed, take you further from closing the deal. You risk becoming a betaboy cipher for all her worries and anxieties, your ear serving as the metaphorical vagina into which she can squirt her emotional discharge. If all you know how to do is listen, you’ll soon be relegated to eunuch status.
Old school PUAs like to say that you should get a woman to talk about herself, because that is how you elicit the values she holds dear, which you can then feed back to her to build a stronger romantic bond and lead the convo to more fruitful, i.e. sexual, explorations. So do try and make an effort to latch onto one or two of her confessional drug-hazed limbic burps; you’ll need that info later in the night.
Cutting a girl off when you deem her to have yapped too much is not hard. Just lay your hand on her forearm and tell her the both of you need to walk to a new sofa/room/bar/park to continue your conversation where it’s quieter. Physical obtrusion is the fastest route to disorienting an excessively yapping girl and resetting the pace of the pickup. There are a lot of upsides to a talkative girl; most importantly, they provide ample ammo opportunities for you to segue the chit chat to more intimate topics. Plus, talkative girls tend to be less judgmental of men, and less prone to resorting to shit tests, because they’re too busy feeling good talking about themselves.
The major downside, of course, is that you will get bored out of your skull.
Anecdote: I overhead a couple on a date where the women did 99% of the talking. The guy just sat there, nodding occasionally, and stirring his drink with a neutral expression on his face. She must have had an ego the size of Jupiter to think that her incessant gabbing would in any way be interesting to anyone. But guess which of those two had hand on that date? Who do you think was in the position of power, and who was scrambling for the other’s approval?
If you have gotten a girl to talk about herself a lot, consider it a good sign; she wants you to think well of her.
PS To answer Randall’s question, I would say to memorize the line “Wow, that’s really interesting. You know, it makes me think of…” After she has said something illuminating or potently self-incriminating, you drop that line and lead her into a story that progresses the pickup. Rewarding any compliments she gives you, or intimacy moves she makes, with a question or two about herself is also a good tactic, but keep in mind that rewards should be intermittently given for good behavior, and punishments always given for bad behavior. This intermittent reward/instant punishment dynamic is the sort of unpredictability coupled with hard-nosed principled dignity that women can’t help but love in men.
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