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.
Good opportunity for kid-glove negs…
I know a lovely little lady who, alas, sometimes evinces a ratchet jaw of her daily activities in tedious detail.
I usually listen patiently, at least for awhile… but the other day it got a bit much:
“You chatter, woman.”
“Oh, but I know you hang on my every word!” (her idea of a shit test, I guess)
“Not on every word, darling… it’s their totality that make me want to hang.”
She blushed and acted a little hurt, but the eyes twinkled.
In the classic Dudley Moore and Peter Cook film _Bedazzled_, the Devil has this advice:
“In the words of Marcel Proust – and this applies to any woman in the world: If you can stay up and listen with a fair degree of attention to whatever garbage, no matter how stupid it is, that they’re coming out with, ’til ten minutes past four in the morning… you’re in. “
“Reward any compliments she gives you, or intimacy moves she makes, with a question or two about herself…and punishments always given for bad behavior.”
You beautifully explain how to reward a woman by asking “a question or two about herself,” which is always an easy task. However, you fail to explain the harder task: how to you punish her for her bad behavior?
I’d imagine you’d grow distant and uninterested. But this would only work if the chick cared what you thought.
Ugh, anybody around the dopamine community has known for years that it’s not actually for pleasure – even the guy who originally made that theory popular (Roy Wise) already took it back (see “dopamine, learning and motivation” for his backtracking, or Kent Berridge’s work on liking vs. wanting). It’s only people who don’t really know anything about this system that always talk about how it’s for feeling of reward, as the lazy way of explaining why they got activation in those regions, since it’s so “commonly known”. As to the study itself, it’s probably more that answering questions about other people (such as Obama) can be a bit challenging, while answering questions about oneself is easy, so their interpretation can be off in several ways.
Not that I’m saying that listening to girls talk about themselves and all that is not a good idea, just had to point out the terribleness of the study and its interpretation (by the scientists themselves!).
Not talking at all is the easiest, and yet that takes more discipline.
That wasn’t an option in the study, just choices between answering questions about themselves or other people. I doubt any “talking” was even involved, since it was in an fMRI machine.
But regardless of that you’re right, not doing can often be more cognitively demanding than doing, especially when there’s a stimulus to trigger the action (i.e. a person, in the case of talking). It’s just irrelevant to that particular (poorly designed) study.
Why don’t you educate us on the real mechanisms that explain why girls like to talk about themselves so much, that should be worthwhile for everybody. You certainly deemed it worthwhile to stomp all over the post and give lengthy exposition on how chateau doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Listening is the most important thing a man can do with a woman. She basically tells you everything you need to know about where you stand with her.
In fact I would say that women are not that great of liars. The reason why they dupe guys all the time is because guys don’t listen.
This can be done with guys too (to make friends obviously). Just smile and nod, then briefly summarize what they said and ask a question or tell a story related to the topic. Also, ask their opinion. People love this.
ex: So you really like the Rangers huh? That’s cool. What do you think of their new offensive lineup?
Romney picked Paul Ryan.
he picked the budget and fiscal conservative choice. so instead of social issues, the election will be about the economy. just like you said, he took a page out of the PUA book:
reframe, reframe, reframe.
15:05, look at their faces. LOL
http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/latest-news/top-stories/husband-s-rage-after-wife-wed-on-holiday-exclusive-1-4823228
Man’s wife marries another man while on vacation (and still married to him), he burns some of her crap and lands in prison for a year. The breaking point is swiftly approaching.
Geez, Gambia?
Either the UK press really gets off on making these stories up, or…
Well, I imagine ol’ John Bull is still basking in the comfort of not having to speak German.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2186420/Darrell-Plews-Husband-torched-designer-handbags-shoes-clothes-wife-wed-new-Gambian-lover.html
Mail has a more detailed story.
I’m sure her new husband will see to it that the 5000 pounds from her former husband goes towards replacing those burnt designer shoes and handbags.
After all, must keep up appearances, what?