The Reality Method 2.0

Buying Temperature and Buyer’s Remorse, and other Retail Analogies in Seduction

In this article, I hope to share how “retail analogies” can be useful in understanding female psychology in the context of dating, and the give-and-take in relationship dynamics.

Why Retail Analogies?
The process of seduction can be very transactional, and for good evolutionary reasons: essentially, the man is offering his genetic material in hopes of combining it with the woman’s (similarly high quality) material, and the likelihood that her youth and beauty will mean she can bring the baby to term safely.

For her part, the woman is weighing the potential costs of a pregnancy (9 months of increasing immobility, time off work, etc) against the perceived value of the seducer’s genes — knowing, if only subconsciously, that she has alternatives.

I’m not suggesting this is a conscious mental process happening during chats in nightclubs and cocktail bars. It is definitely an unconscious mental process of evaluation. A typical girl might be thinking: “Is this guy serious? Is he being honest? Does he want to stick around and help me raise kids, providing for them and me financially, or does he just want in my pants for tonight? Is it just because he’s drunk?”

Whereas the guy is thinking, “Is this girl actually hot, or is it just the lighting? Is she gonna put out tonight? Is she a party girl? Has she slept around, will she give me something?”

Both parties are weighing potential costs and benefits, as well as trying to determine the other party’s true intent and motive. In this respect it’s much like dealing with a car salesman.

As far as I’m concerned, dating and seduction is all value-based, no matter how subtle the value determinations are. In the traditional dating model it’s pretty blatant: Buy me a drink, buy me dinner, “pay” me a compliment.

Looking at how our language has evolved to take this into account, it’s no wonder higher-level seduction concepts are frequently expressed as retail analogies.

Buying Temperature
BT is a fun and easy concept.

The term “buying temperature” is straight from from car salesman (and probably other big-ticket retail environments). The concept is that “buying temperature” is just a measure of somebody’s likelihood to buy an item.

So, high BT = “Damn, I want this item, I think I’m gonna get it.”
And low BT = “Not interested.”

It’s that simple. Say you’re looking at buying a new car. You’re talking to the salesman and he’s describing the features and benefits of the car. As he talks, you realize this car DOES have antilock breaks (you didn’t think it did). And maybe it DOES have heated seats (which you love). And it DOES have power steering and Sirius satellite radio (which you also love).

You are getting more and more excited about this car. Your buying temperature is rising! Think of it very literally like a thermometer — the more good info you hear about the car that makes you want to buy it, the “hotter” you get.

Finally, the guy says he’s willing to give you a deal on the car — $7,500 below sticker price. Your buying temperature spikes! “I’ll take it!” You shout.

But the guy stops you. “Unfortunately, at that price, we won’t be able to finance it for you. You’ll have to pay cash.”

You don’t have the cash available; you won’t be able to get the car. Your BT crashes: “Oh. Well forget it then.” The deal is off.

BT works the same way in women. It’s especially obvious in clubs, where you see various things impacting girls buying temperature and ramping it up or down. What’s important with the club or bar environment is not so much WHAT exactly the girl is focusing on to “buy”, but simply that, with a high buying temperature, she is more likely to buy something — frequently, whatever is put in front of her.

Think of BT in women as a sort of overall gauge of their happiness, excitement and positive affect. A happy, excited girl is going to be pretty accepting of meeting new people, right? Then high BT in a girl is a good thing. A bitchy, angry girl who is having a shitty day is not going to be looking to get into conversations with strangers, or take shit from anybody — she has a “low” buying temperature. She’s cold. She has to be warmed up.

Here are some things that ramp or spike a girl’s BT:

These are just examples. When I say a girl’s BT is “ramped” I mean it’s being increased slowly, whereas a “spike” is a sudden jump, but it’s all semantics.

Here’s the cheat sheet.

• Buying temperature is most useful as a concept when applied to early stages of the interaction or seduction — when you’ve just met a woman.
• Most women are going to be “cool” towards you when you first meet them. Expect that.
• Understand that you have to warm them up, and pump up their BT to the point that they’ll “buy” you.
• Understand also that it’s best to ramp BT up gradually — if you spike it too high, too fast, women will get freaked out and try to find a way to “shed” excess BT heat. You see this frequently in clubs, it’s why women touch and grab and grind and hug each other so much — the physical contact is actually shedding the BT “heat” (and physical arousal). Women have a very calibrated kinesthetic touch-community thing going on anyway.
• If you (or whatever else) spikes a woman’s BT too high, too fast, too hard, she’ll fry. Literally, she will emotionally break down, start crying, freak out, whatever you want to call it. There are guys out there who can do this to a girl within 5 minutes of meeting her. Doing this deliberately is hardcore social and psychological manipulation, and it is NOT nice, but it is sort of vaguely, sickly impressive. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to fry a girl out emotionally like this, except just to fuck with her.
• Buying temperature is transferable. Basically this means that if you spend 2 hours gradually ramping a girl’s BT up, attracting her, getting her aroused and excited and happy and engaged, and then leave for 5 minutes, another guy is likely to come right along and take advantage of all the work you’ve done — the woman is now going to be perfectly willing to “buy” him. In most club situations and with most girls, it will not matter a single bit that you were the one she was attracted to — what matters is the girl’s high BT and her need to shed it somehow, with someone.

That’s the quick and dirty of buying temperature. Moving right along…

Buyer’s Remorse
This concept applies specifically to sex and/or fooling around — pretty much any activity that could be perceived by the girl as “slutty”.

Buyer’s remorse (BRE) is another concept lifted straight out of retail scenarios. If you’ve ever bought a product in a store (maybe because a good salesman pumped your BT high enough quick enough) and then taken it home to realize you really didn’t need it or want it, you know what buyer’s remorse feels like. You throw the thing down, look at it regretfully, and realize you miss the money you spent on it. You can now think of about 1,000 other things you’d rather spend the money on. That’s buyer’s remorse.

Well, women can have those same feelings about hooking up with a guy too soon. BRE is most common after one-night stands, or even drunken make outs, or anything physical that happened while a girl was under the influence of alcohol.

CATCH-22: Note that, while most women need there to be some ‘excuse’ present for them to be able to abdicate responsibility for things getting sexual (alcohol, drugs, party atmosphere, being in a different country, Spring Break, money, etc), many of the same girls will later get extreme BRE precisely because of those same “enabling factors”. It’s a failure of backwards rationalization: whereas, if a girl was backwards rationalizing properly, would say, “That guy was just so hot, and I really liked him, plus it was the 5th year and six month anniversary of my breakup with Teddy, so it was the perfect day to have sex,” a girl with BRE would just say, “OMG, I was just emotional that night, so he was able to get me DRUNK and TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ME!”

So “enabling factors” are a double-edged sword that can cut both ways; whether they cut for you or against you depends on a number of things, critically including the woman’s own level of self-esteem. Low self-esteem girls are more likely to feel “slutty” for having had sex with you on the first night (or 2nd, or 3rd, or whichever number….as long as they perceive to to be “too soon”) and therefore experience massive amounts of BRE.

Buyer’s remorse can also be a way for the girl to express fears that you won’t stand by her, i.e. that it was just for the sex. So girls who are feeling BRE will typically text you things like, “Do you really like me?” or “Are we still friends?”, or call you and try to clarify the relationship the next day, or the morning after or what have you.

KEY TACTIC: One thing I’ve found to work extremely well to head off BRE is to pre-emptively address female fears. You don’t do this by reassuring them in a calm, logical way: “It’s okay that I just fucked you after meeting you 20 minutes ago, we’ll still be great friends.” Saying that will make her feel like a slut (and is condescending to boot). Instead, take the mental position that SHE would take, and actually ASK, as she would, something like: “Are we still friends?” This tactic is MONEY. By asking this, not only are you PRE-SUPPOSING friendship (which otherwise would have been in question), you are also essentially flipping the script on the woman: now SHE is in a position of having to reassure YOU, and if YOU need reassuring then clearly you aren’t a sexual predator who just pulled a pump-and-dump…which is very reassuring to HER.

PERSONAL STORY: I nearly got into serious trouble with BRE, during the crazy days of my youth. I was doing some training for a new job and in that training I met a few cute girls — one of whom was really attracted to me. She was Serbian and Basque. Wonderful girl. Quite cute.

So, we ended up hanging out, and somehow she ended up coming back to my place (somehow it always works out that way….) where we proceeded to have cocktails and get very drunk. Of course we started making out and what not….and actually, there was very little if any “what not” going on (although I was heading that direction). For her part, this wonderful girl was enjoying the make-out and the evening. Eventually, I sent her home.

The next day around noon, she called and thanked me for a lovely evening. And also because she’d left a bunch of hairpins on my floor (frequently happens). I told her she could come by and pick them up any time.

I hear nothing from her for about two weeks. THEN, I hear from a good friend of mine, who heard from through an extended grapevine of acquaintances (both male and female) that this girl had called a good female friend a few days after hanging out with me, CRYING, and basically saying everything up to but not quite to the point of alleging rape.

And we hadn’t even had sex.

And here’s the beautiful part, the real kicker that makes the entire story worthwhile:

Midway through the evening, after we’d started fooling around but by no means before we were done, this girl had taken some time to pull out her stationary and write me a note. It was cute little Hello Kitty stationary. It said, and I SHIT YOU NOT:

Thank you for indulging me and playing Alanis Morrissette!

Vodka + thirtyplus = Phenomenal! OMG!

And dated it. And signed it with her own hand.

The girl wrote out what amounts to a written confession that she was enjoying spending time making out with me….WHILE DRINKING….and even called me happily the next day….and then, days or weeks down the road, was hit with a case of buyer’s remorse so bad that she just about made a full-blown rape accusation.

I still have the note, of course.

Watch that shit, guys. She won’t always write a note for you. Watch the alcohol, but more importantly, watch the buyer’s remorse.

Other Retail Analogies
And here we get to the quick-and-dirty: the “other” retail analogies that are all but ubiquitous. Since I’ve rambled on for too long already, I’m going to do these encyclopedia-style.

“Closing“: Concluding an interaction with a woman with some definitive step forward, or progression in the interaction. Similar to “closing a deal”. Modified by the following:

Number close: Getting her phone number or email.

K-close: Kissing her.

F-close: The Full Monty; “sealing the deal”. Bringing it home. (Fucking).

Like in retail scenarios, remember A.B.C….Always Be Closing. Women respond well to men that are always moving forward, constantly escalating the relationship. If you just sit in place for days or weeks she’ll lose interest. On the other hand, you have to calibrate and not push too hard, because then you’ll come off as needy or too horny, or run the risk of triggering serious BRE (see story above).

Low self-esteem girls can be driven to tears because they are both attracted to you and afraid of losing you if they don’t give it up on schedule….but often even if they shut you down on the spot, they will come back to you years later because they’ve still not met another man who was willing to push as consistently as you did (and that is directly taken from my own experience, I’ve had multiple girls come back to me years later and say “nobody treated me like you did,” etc etc).

Pushing consistently is a compliment to the girl; don’t forget that. It can also be dangerous in our current litigious society; so watch your ass.

Related Articles:

• States and Frames Explained
• Understanding and Disarming "Last Minute Resistance"
• What Makes Women Hot (or, Understanding Attraction)