A couple commenters brought up traveling in a couple of my last posts wanting to know the effects of it (not to mention an interesting thread I got sucked into over at Roosh’s website about Argentinian women). But I digress… the question, does traveling improve your ability with women? And if so, in what ways?

First of all, yes, it does — but not just women, it improves your ability with people and lifestyle in general. Whenever I coach a guy who hasn’t gotten out and traveled much, I always immediately tell them to do it. Here are the benefits, from most basic to the most deep:

1) Gives you interesting things to talk about. On a very superficial level, traveling provides interesting stories and experiences. Also, if you’ve been everywhere, then you can relate to everyone you meet because you are immediately familiar with where they’re from. I can’t tell you how many times this has come in handy, whether it’s meeting an Armenian girl in Vegas (and actually knowing where Armenia is) to knowing the differences between north French people and southern French people, being able to distinguish Vietnamese from Japanese just by looking at them, speaking Spanish to a Peruvian, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. But they all have one thing in common: they present you as a more interesting and attractive person.

Traveling a lot and being well-cultured isn’t necessarily always an attractive trait to all women, but it’s never unattractive.

Going one level deeper…

2) Variety of experience and people. The more you travel, the more experiences and people you come in contact with. And not only that, but the more DIFFERENT people you meet. This affects you quite a bit because the wider variety of people you’ve interacted with, the easier you’re going to relate to anybody. For instance, if you sit in your basement all day and play Counterstrike, then the difference between kind of a nerdy girl and a crazy club girl is going to seem gigantic. But if you’ve spent months or even years in foreign countries and experienced the vast cultural differences between say, Japanese people and Brazilian people, then suddenly those two American girls seem pretty damn similar to one another.

The biggest benefit that I’ve gotten from traveling and meeting women from around the world is pretty straightforward: eventually you realize that no matter how “different” everyone seems… we’re all pretty much the same. And deep down, all women are pretty much the same — fuck that, PEOPLE are all pretty much the same.

We all have hopes and ambitions and fears and fuck ups. We all have families, people who love us, people we love, friends, enemies and successes and failures. We all just go about it differently, whether it’s a stylistic difference or cultural difference.

What kind of drives me crazy recently is this idea that girls from different countries are sooooooo different from one another. Hell, I even run into guys who tell me like, “Oh, this is LA, girls are different here.” Excuse me, but… HAHAHAHA!!!! In the end, women relatively all want the same thing and react the same way to the same things. Unless you’re in a vastly different culture like India or Saudia Arabia or Mongolia or something, cultural differences are minor and the only REAL obstacle after that tends to be language barriers (which are a HUGE pain in the ass by the way).

Being exposed to such a wide variety of people helps you realize what’s important in human interaction and what’s superficial and fleeting. That’s a perspective that I wouldn’t trade back for the world (no pun intended).

Going even deeper still…

3) Stretching your personal comfort zone. If you’ve been studying this stuff for even a couple months, you should have realized by now that a major part of this whole process is learning to be comfortable in new and intimidating situations. In fact, one could argue that if there’s ONE THING that determines your success with women, it would be learning how to be comfortable and confident in a wide variety of social situations.

Well, imagine this: you’re in a far-away, exotic country. You’re by yourself. Everything you own is on your back. You don’t know a single person and you don’t speak the language… AT ALL. Even finding and buying food is a taxing process. How comfortable are you?

When you travel in those kind of situations, you’re quickly forced to become comfortable and self-reliant around people who are completely alien to you. Stopping someone in the streets of Nicaragua and begging for directions even though you know no Spanish, trying to figure out if something’s safe to eat on the beaches of Jamaica, trying to bribe a bouncer to get into a club in Paris… all by yourself.

Approaching some drunk American girl seems pretty simple after that.

And finally, a cool video that I love and I think any world traveler (or aspiring world traveler) will love. It really kind of sums up what I’m talking about as well. I have to admit, first time I saw this, it got me a little choked up…