The Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want (27 page)

  You’re not connecting with her at all. You could have emailed her your questions beforehand and picked up the answers later!

  Generally, the conversation doesn’t deviate from a predictable, prescripted sequence. You don’t follow any of the new routes suggested by her answers.

  She’s had this conversation hundreds of times before.

So what you need to do is:

  Take some of the pressure off.

  Reward her for giving you information.

  Make an attempt to connect with her on as many points as possible.

What you should in fact do is connect, go deeper, every time you elicit a piece of information. Remember our earlier discussion of links? You should be trying to produce a link and then using it to extend the interaction by making a statement. Every response she gives is a link. You need to be able to make a statement or observation, if possible in the second or third person, about what she has just said, and then follow it with a question.

Here’s a good formula to remember:

You speaking = 90 percent statements,

10 percent questions.

Keeping the conversation going is a problem for most guys. Generally we run out of stuff to say and go blank. You might ask, “Have you been to Miami?” She says, “Yeah, years ago, when I was a kid.” You say, “Oh, I might go there soon,” and she says, “Oh, cool.” Then that thread has gone dry and you need to switch subjects. There’s a pause and you’ve run out of stuff to say. It happened because you connected at the lowest possible level, at the least interesting level of speech—talking about yourself in relation to a subject she doesn’t have much to say about.

If you’d directed the conversation to a more fertile area—one that connected with her—you would have gotten a much better response from her and thus had more to say in response.

If you do run out of things to say, you always have two options to fall back on—dropping down to a lower level (talking about yourself), or switching threads.

A Note on Storytelling

Guys often ask me how they can improve their storytelling, because other popular pickup theories place a strong emphasis on it as an important part of a seduction. Personally, I don’t like storytelling as a tool for pickup, because I don’t believe that a story allows for connection and therefore it doesn’t help a close. Women can get great stories from books and movies, but not necessarily a sense of connection and understanding. For the most part, no story is as interesting as meeting someone you feel completely connected to and understood by.

It’s worth noting here that talking about yourself is fine once a connection or attraction has been made. A girl could sit and listen to Johnny Depp talk about himself all day and enjoy it, because the attraction and interest are already there. When someone feels connected with you, she naturally wants to find out more about you; however, too much self-referencing should be avoided in the early stages, before that connection is established.

When you’re talking to a girl, you generally want to lead the conversation. This means that you have a conscious idea of which way you want to direct it. But there are bad—unproductive—conversational areas that you want to avoid:

  Talking about yourself all the time

  Talking about dark subjects such as war or violence, which I cautioned against earlier

  Addressing shallow subjects—generalities like the weather, television, or small talk about work