The Reality Method 2.0

The Key to a Succesful First Date

In seduction and dating literature, you often see the phraseology “day 2″.

Like, “Man, I have day 2’s set up for every day this week.”

Although this sounds a little odd, a “day 2″ is really just what most of would call a date.

Calling it a “day 2″ is a reflection of how most guys go about interacting with girls: they meet a nice girl, get her number, and call her to hang out. The first time they meet the girl is Day 1; the second time is Day 2.

Now if you’re at all like me, this may not make much sense to you, because before I got a lot of experience with women, the first “serious date” I had with a woman interested in me wasn’t a “day 2″….it was more like a “day 200″. The girl had to throw herself at me for that long before I got the idea that we should do a ‘date-like’ activity, such as a movie or dinner out together.

Once you get more practiced, however, everything flows more smoothly. It doesn’t matter where you meet the girl — bar, club, restaurant, library, coffee shop, PTA meeting — you hook her, get her number, let’s continue this later, bam. Call her up later, I’m doing X at Y, come along, bam. You’ve got your “day 2″, or “date” as you previously thought about.

(Note: I never use that language, ‘date’. Dates are traditionally about paying the girl to hang out with you, which I refuse to do. I call it ‘hanging out’ instead. This is normal to girls young and old. Dating is serious and scary; hanging out is low-impact, low-commitment and fun).

So, to be clear, the assumption in this article is that this will be the first time you and her will be meeting together, more or less alone (though perhaps in public), and focusing most specifically on each other.

Note Redux: The level of familiarity you will have with a girl before meeting on a day 2 varies greatly. I’ve had day 2’s ranging all the way from having spent 10 hours on the phone with the girl, to having never even gotten her phone #, to being barely able to remember what she looks like (and not remembering her name), to having known her for 6 months or more via the internet and never having actually seen her in the flesh before. Because of this huge variability, this post can only offer limited advice in the form of broad generalities — but I do promise that these are golden generalities.

The Cardinal Rule of “Dating” and Seduction
I’m going to take just a moment to say that with first dates, as with all of seduction, there is pretty much one over-arching rule that applies, that you could do worse than follow:

Persist. Happily and gently.

That’s it. You must be persistent in moving forward towards your goal (the lay, a relationship, whatever). But you must do it from a place of happiness and contentment, not neediness — and you must do it g e n t l y. Pushing too hard or too fast, while it works in some cases, is much more likely to cause the sort of intense resistance you have to “plow” through or deploy more sophisticated social and psychological tools against.

And that’s not the goal. The goal is to 1) Get to your destination, but 2) Enjoy the journey.

Now some of you may say I’m full of shit here, and that’s fine, you’re entitled to that. What I’m saying, though, is that my years of experience with women tell me that not only is persistence very attractive to women, but gentle, happy, positive persistence is the most effective type.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, onwards.

Successful First Dates / Day 2’s in TWO WORDS

1. Fun
2. Kino (touching)

From back to front…

1. The “Kino” part
Woah, there goes more creepy seduction-expert lingo. Kino from kinesthetics, that is, physical bodily contact. It seems to me I’ve written a little about touching girls before….oh yes, in Body Language.

The gist of it is, women are not going to rip off your pants or start fondling your manly pecs; they are going to wait for you, THE MAN, to start touching them. Women love above all to feel cherished; and being touched in the right way gives them that feeling.

You’d be amazed at how many guys out there do not touch girls the right way. I know this may be a shocking idea, but it’s true. I don’t know how many women I’ve had tell me “You really know how to touch a girl” and even a few times “You know more about my anatomy than I do!” It’s a great compliment to get, really.

But I digress; kino on a first date / day 2 is not about advanced anatomy. It’s about making her comfortable being in physical contact with you (which will set her at ease, an make it less awkward for the inevitable physical escalation to sex).

So touch her arm, touch her shoulder in conversation — playfully push her when she makes fun of you. Offer her your arm like a gentleman, or take her arm and pretend to be a lady. As you’re walking, bump into her and shove her off the sidewalk (just make sure there are no oncoming cars). Slap her ass (my personal favorite). Pinch her, hard. Do it randomly. Push the envelope. It’s the best way to learn.

Final notes on kino. Many guys push push push on the first date (day 2) trying to lay the girl. I used to be this way, but not anymore — partially because I’ve gotten slower and more patient in my old age, and partially because it’s not congruent with my personality. Some girls I may kiss on a day 2, others I might not even go that far. Every girl is different, the level of attraction will be different, the kind of attraction will be different, and you can’t say there’s a one-size-fits-all rule (like “always push push push for the lay on the day 2, she’ll respect you for it.”) I mean, if you want to screen for women that won’t fuck on the first date, then by all means push relentlessly until they shut you down, and then screen them out (I joke — and that’s a horrible method of screening, by the way).

2. The Fun Part
Look, dates are supposed to be FUN, right? A girl should want to hang out with you, to spend time with you, not only because she’s attracted to you, but because she has fun when you’re together — because you put her in a better state than she otherwise would be.

Think about it this way. If the girl WASN’T there with you, what would you be doing? Would you sit by a coffee shop, without reading or using the internet, staring off into space, for a few hours? Hell no. You’d get up and DO something; you’d have fun.

(And if you DO spend hours staring into space in coffee shops, just don’t do it when girls are trying to get to know you).

So don’t just sit in a coffee shop chatting about inane things for 3 hours — and I saw this as someone who has spent many an afternoon sitting in a coffee shop chatting with a beautiful woman about inane things for 3 hours. Get up, move around, take her shopping (even if you don’t buy anything), go to a park, splash her with water, walk on the waterfront, just DO SOMETHING (fun).

The great things about these two keys is that they are self-reinforcing. On the one hand, having fun together is likely to increase comfort, making the girl more receptive to escalating levels of kino — and, let’s be honest, kino itself is fun.

So do this as a self-monitoring exercise on Day 2’s: ask these questions:

Am I having fun?

And

Am I moving our physical relationship forward?

If you are answering “Yes” to both those questions consistently, you are on the right track.

If you’re not moving the physical relationship forward, but are having fun, you are headed towards LJBF-land.

If you’re not having fun, chances are she’s not either….and you’re probably not advancing the physical relationship, either.

If She Flakes
First of all, wait. Wait three hours. Take the time to purge any emotional reaction you had to being stood up (I’ve been stood-up, I know it can piss you off). Check the article linked above for how to de-program those emotional reactions (like “How dare she diss me!” and so forth).

Second, Don’t take it personally. Women flake for ALL KINDS OF REASONS. Maybe she was so attracted to you she was afraid she’d sleep with you if she hung out. Maybe she told her friends and they talked her out of it (out of jealousy). Maybe her grandma died and she had to go to the funeral. Maybe her Fluffersnickles got kennel cough.

The point is, you can’t know why she flaked, so it’s absolutely 100% pointless to assign negative motives to her (”She was playing me” / “What a bitch”). Instead, wait three hours at least (or however long it takes you to cool down from whatever emotions being stood up caused in you), and realize that it wasn’t personal. Only then should you move onto the next step, which is:

Contact her. Phone, email, txt, carrier pigeon, however you two have communicated before. If you’re calling her on the phone, make sure there is no trace of accusation or anger in your voice when you talk to her. Those emotions will just shut her down. WHEN you contact her, WHETHER you talk to her real-time or are leaving a voice-mail / email, follow this general script:

“Hey dork [pet name/whatever], I think I remember about us having plans to do X at Y, but I didn’t see you there! I’m so crushed…I’m going to cry myself to sleep tonight, thanks to you…ok later (OR) You’re so forgetful! You remind me of my little sister, she has to use sticky-notes to remind her to look in her day-planner…[click]”

Of course you have to calibrate all this, and the specific lines you use may be very different. But here’s the underlying gist, the subtextual message you are sending:

1. I vaguely remember some plans we had.
2. I couldn’t care less that you didn’t show up.
3. I bear no ill will, and as a sign of my good intentions, will continue to bust on you.

Again, calibration is key, and it’s different if a girl makes a consistent habit of flaking, or if she’s older, if you’re older, or whatever. The point is, you are being nonreactive, not accusing her, not flipping out and getting mad, and not “causing drama” in her life. You are, in effect, reminding her of how fun you are — which typically makes girls wish they HAD been able to meet you.

Remember, women are mercurial creatures, much like the weather. You should take as much offense to a girl flaking on you as you do when the ballgame you were going to watch gets rained out.

If She Brings a Friend
A girl who shows up with a friend, unannounced and un-arranged, has one of two things going on:

1. She’s attracted to you, and her friend is the chaperon to make sure you guys don’t have sex
2. She’s not attracted to you, and is afraid you’ll make a move, and her friend is insurance

Seeing a pattern her? A friend showing up with her = No Sex For You.

The only logistical counter to this is having a friend of your own waiting in the wings, so if a cockblock does show up with her, you can say “Hey, cool, the more the merrier, let me call my buddy X to meet up with us” and bring in a cockblock for the cockblock. Then it’s like chess, and your buddy engages the cockblock and draws her off while you focus on the target.

If you’re not so lucky to have a buddy who can do this for you, or all your buddies are busy on that day, then you’re pretty much S.O.L as far as escalation is concerned. You could try to seduce them both at the same time and take it into threesome territory, but that not only requires considerable skill, but also luck (the girls are somewhat predisposed towards sexual encounters with each other and a strange man — NOT unheard of, contrary to what some of you may think).

If you’re like me, though, you worry less about whether or not you’re getting sex on that particular day, and more about the root cause of the Uninvited Friend Syndrome — is she TOO attracted to you, or NOT attracted enough? Does she, in fact, think you’re creepy?

Use the 3d-wheel Scenario as an opportunity to try to suss this out. There are a number of tests you can perform to figure out whether she’s attracted to you, or how attracted to you she is, but those are better left for another article. Suffice to say it IS possible to reverse out of this scenario, and therefore the Uninvited Friend Syndrome does not necessarily spell the death of a seduction.

Closing Words
To recap:

1. Persist. Happily. Gently

2. Have fun.

3. Kino.

Always move forward. Don’t be PUSHY or NEEDY — just persist and move forward, steadily, inexorably. Advance. It’s a male thing.