The context: You’ve met a girl (not through social connections) and exchanged numbers. You and her went on a first date to a local dive a few days later, and it was good — comfortable rapport punctuated with sensual makeouts. A few more days pass and you call to arrange a second date. This time she invites you to join her at a public event where she will be in attendance along with many of her friends and friends of friends. It is an event that was long ago preplanned, and she is obligated to go. She says you’re welcome to invite some of your friends as well.
The quandary: Do you, or do you not, agree to meet her and, presumably, all her friends, at this event for a second date?
The crux: You are not a newb at the game. You understand that a “group” date will put the brakes on moving the seduction forward to a juicy climax of lustmaking. A girl is not likely to risk slut labeling by physically escalating with you, a new man, in the company of her friends. In the past, you would have balked at such a date suggestion, and offered her the opportunity to meet you another time when she is free of obligations, but you are not so easily dissuaded anymore by these kinds of traditional dating momentum killers. Your spirit flows with the essence of the rakes of seductions past and the life lessons of years of experience, and you sense opportunity where lesser men see obstacles.
What do you do?
The analysis that should be going through your head:
If you are confident in your social savviness, a chance to meet a date’s friends is a chance to work the room. In other words, it’s a chance to demonstrate higher value on the cheap. If you get bored of the usual first-second date routine, (and, truth be told, if you are even semi-decent at game you should be going on enough first and second dates that they get boring after a while, no matter what the girl is like), then a date where her friends will be present is a way to spice things up. You can stretch your abilities and challenge yourself by striking up conversations with strangers and making her girlfriends, and whatever guy friends she has, laugh and enjoy the pleasure of your company.
If you are less confident in your social skills, a group oriented date could ruin your chances. It’s bad enough when a one-on-one date goes cold; it’s irrevocably worse when a one-on-twenty “date” winds up with you the odd man out because you’re too shy or awkward to command a room and handle multi-threaded conversations without turning spergy. Nothing will lower your value faster than meeting a group of people and slowly disappearing into the wall, nursing your drink despondently, as everyone around you has fun.
But, high risk high reward. The flip side of crossing the event horizon of a massive DLV implosion is the chance to explode in a glorious DHV supernova. No guts no glory.
What about the motivations of the girl? You don’t know her well enough yet to get a sense of that, but you do know that her motivations aren’t necessarily bad. Sure, a girl may invite you on a group second date because subconsciously she is taking a step back from you, unsure if you are the knight of her 463 bullet point mental checklist. The “meet the friends” pre-sex date is often better termed the “meet the buffer zone” second date. If that is the case, you would be right to decline the date.
But a girl could just as easily like you so much that she blithely sees nothing wrong with the date+friends formula. She is happy to see you whenever an opportunity arises, whether on a conventional date or in the company of her friends. Remember that cute girls, being the discriminating sex accustomed to passively accepting approaches by men, have never had to learn in any great depth the reality of the sexual market and what constitutes a dating faux pas. They simply lack the awareness of how precarious the mating dance is for men, who must jump through many more hoops to get sexytime than women do (that is, until those women get older or fatter and their bond rating downgraded). If women were subjected to the same dating rules as men and understood how seemingly trivial social missteps can mean the difference between getting rejected or loved, I doubt many of them would be able to function at all in the dating scene, their egos relentlessly hammered into pulpy globules of self-doubt and anxiety.
There is another explanation for her motivations; she may like you and want to a) show you off to her friends, b) observe how her friends react to you (a form of preselection), and c) observe how well you handle her friends. All these motivations could issue from a desire to want to find justifications for her feelings of attraction to you. Many times girls are psychologically stampeded by their own growing attraction. A girl risks a lot more than men do in the relinquishment to arousal — pregnancy, for one. In the state of nature, pre-safe abortion and pre-widespread contraceptives, a surrender to womanly desire could spell disaster. A man has no equivalent worry. And so, in an effort to justify her desire and “make it OK” for her to continue surrendering to you, she will sometimes throw dating curveballs to test your mettle, ease her conscience, and pave the way for her arousal to find fulfillment. These curveballs can be banal, like the oddly suggested group date, or invidious, like the bitchy shit test.
In the final analysis, if your game is shaky, you may want to avoid any pre-sex group oriented dates as a rule. The risk is probably not worth the potential upside, and it won’t cost you much to simply decline in favor of a future one-on-one date in dim lighting. If, on the other hand, your social savvy is impressive and you’re confident that the girl is really into you, meeting her friends could be a fast track to intimacy.
******
UPDATE
What I did:
I told her I’d stop by. I went and chatted up her friends while she darted about catching up with them and performing event duties. She went out of her way to introduce me to many of her friends, which I thought was cool. And, as a nice bonus, one of her cute female friends flirted with me for quite a while, which wasn’t much of a surprise as girls tend to become more intrigued when they see you in the company of one of their girl friends. I left by myself a couple hours later, after I told her to enjoy the rest of the night with her friends. Our next date was very good.
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