I got a question for you thats been bugging me for a long time now because I can’t seem to figure it out, basically its how can you make shyness work?  I know you must get a lot of students that are introverts and shy and such and the thing about being shy and introverted is that it’s very hard to change.  Its just the way we are, so instead of changing that I was wondering if you had any advice on how to make it work.  I’m not looking for “just be more outgoing bro”, I want to know if you have any advice on using it to one’s advantage.

I think there’s a difference between an introvert and being shy. Shyness implies a level of anxiety or discomfort talking to people and/or strangers. Introverts are merely people who PREFER to keep to themselves. There are introverts who are very socially adept and who can “turn on” their sociability, whereas shy people can never really do this.

The other difference is that shyness is something that you can change — it’s a matter of getting over the anxiety and inhibitions in the appropriate social situations. Not being an introvert IS harder (although research shows that this can change throughout your lifetime as well).

Also, a warning, any time you say, “it’s just the way we are,” you’re limiting yourself and making an excuse for your behavior.

Yes, you can be introverted and very good at pick up. You don’t have to open 15 sets a night or be super loud and high energy. You can sit back, pick your spots and sets, and encourage her to talk more. The so-called “strong, silent type” can be very sexy to women.

But shyness, you HAVE to get over. That nervousness, the hesitance, the awkwardness around people you don’t know. You have to overcome that. How to do that? Well, there’s only about 8302 pages of material written on approach anxiety and social anxiety in this community, so you may want to start there.

My advice? Just do it. Throw yourself into as many uncomfortable situations as possible. Really push yourself to talk more, to open yourself up and pay attention to how you feel doing it. Eventually the tightness of the anxiety and fear will subside and you’ll quit caring so much. Sure, you may never become the rowdiest, craziest guy in the bar, but you don’t have to be to be successful.

Everywhere I go, there’s always talk about how, “well, women are hotter/nicer/meaner/easier/sexier/lamer/fatter/skinnier here than women in country X.”

Everyone seems to have a little bit of “grass is always greener” syndrome… ESPECIALLY Americans. To be honest, the best cities in the US actually hold up pretty well on the global scale of hottness. But more on that in a minute.

I’ve been out in 11 countries in the last year, spending more than a month in 3 of them and more than two weeks in 6 of them.

And although, I don’t have the definitive answer on such questions as “which country has the hottest/easiest/sexiest/most fun/etc. women?” (I don’t think you can make such a blanket statement.) I do think that I’ve devised the proper way of looking at women in various countries.

There are two factors to take into consideration: average hotness, and range of hotness.

Average Hotness: Self explanatory. The most common sense and useful metric of judging the attractiveness of women in a country. You just walk down the streets, go to the restaurants and bars, take the subways and look around. Look at all the women and come to some sort of average perception of them.

Unfortunately, this isn’t completely reliable. For instance, take France. France has far more 7’s and 8’s than the US. But far fewer 9’s and 10’s (they seemed to not even exist there.)  So on the one hand, France didn’t have any of the fat disgusting pigs that us Americans have to deal with on a nightly basis, but at the same time, they had very, very few scorchers as well — women who you just stop and stare at for a solid 20 seconds along with every other guy in the room.

This brings us to our next metric: Range.

Range of Hotness: Obviously every country is going to have women on the extreme high ends and on the extreme low ends. That’s unavoidable. What I’m more concerned with is where do the BULK of women fall into in terms of attractiveness?

So, range is devised to account for the range of hotness of say, 80% of the population.

So back to the France and US example… France has a much smaller range, probably 6 to 8, whereas the US’s range is probably more like 4.5 to 9. Overall, France has a slightly higher average (7 compared to 6.75), but a slimmer distribution.

Here are a few break downs based on my somewhat limited experience (all ratings are based on LIKELY prospects, i.e., women between 18-35, and seen out at bars or clubs):

USA: R4.5-9, Avg. 6.75
The US really is the “melting pot” of the world (along with countries like Brazil). You get everything here. I personally think US women tend to have nicer faces than European girls, but also tend to be maybe 5lbs (2kgs) overweight on average. At the same time, we have an EXTREMELY vain culture, so you get a lot of girls who really know how to take care of themselves, use a lot of make up, dress very fashionable/slutty, spend a lot of time on their hair/tans/etc.

In general, the best quality is found in souther Florida, southern California, and in NYC… the further into the interior of the country, the worse it gets (with a few minor exceptions in the south.)

UK: R5-8, Avg. 6.5
More variance than continental Europe, but also a slightly lower average. Opposite of the US in that the girls tended to have decent bodies, but bad faces/teeth.

France/Germany/Belgium/Holland: 6-8, Avg. 7
After about a month in this part of Europe, every woman basically looked exactly the same to me: not ugly, but not gorgeous either. Healthy but not amazing bodies. Dresses well. Shrug…

Czech Republic: R6-9.5, Avg. 7.75
Quality in women takes a noticeable step up the further east you go. The women in Czech Republic (especially in the locals bars in Prague) were a full point hotter than the women in western Europe. Unfortunately, absolutely none of them speak English.

Israel: R6.5-8, Avg. 7.25
See western Europe. Add better tans, and slightly better bodies (must be the military duty).

Brazil: R4-10, Avg. 7
HUGE variance. A night out in Brazil, you will see some absolute stunners. This is a very diverse and very vain culture. Unfortunately, you’ll also see some disgustingly ugly girls as well. Brazilians know how to dress, how to dance, keep themselves in shape, and are very sexual.

Generally, the further south you go, the better the quality gets and vice-versa. Sao Paulo was impressive, although I hear legends about Rio (from tourists) and Florianopolis (from locals).

Argentina: R6-8, Avg. 7
Again, see western Europe. Except Argentinians are probably slightly prettier than Europeans, but for whatever reason, they dress like shit and don’t wear makeup. It’s like they’re all hippies or something, I can’t figure it out.

“Knowing that there are ten more out there, I find myself not really caring to much about the women I date.  I know you end up with a solo girlfriend from time to time, how does that happen?  Or is it just a situation where you get bored with the game?”

This is a FANTASTIC question and one that I’ve struggled with for years and continue to struggle with.

Getting bored with the game is definitely NOT the issue. In fact, it’s typically quite the opposite. It takes me a notoriously long time to commit to women BECAUSE I love the game so much.

My policy for commitment is like this:
- I date multiple women regularly and indefinitely. They come and go.
- Eventually, as time goes on, a few stick around for quite a while and we get a little bit closer.
- The more I like a particular girl, the less motivated I will be to find new ones, as I’ll be spending more and more time with her.
- Eventually, I’ll reach a point with one woman, where I naturally enjoy my time with her more than I do any others.

This “breaking point” will be apparent when you bang new girls and practically your IMMEDIATE thought after banging them is, “Wow, I wish X was here instead…”

Once that starts happening, X is probably girlfriend material.

Caveat: Anything involving traveling and distance is off the table. I don’t know what it is, but traveling, vacations, and long-distance distorts your perceptions of one another, your emotions and your expectations. Don’t ever make a serious commitment with someone who you can’t physically see on a long-term basis.

This has happened to me twice in the last 4.5 years. For both of the girlfriends I committed to, I probably passed up on 2-3 borderline candidates. But you should never settle.

My guess is that if you’re going through women like dirty laundry, have been for years and are just never coming across women that you’d consider committing to, then you have a standards issue.

You’re picking low-hanging fruit. You’re going after women who YOU are out of their league.

This is actually fairly common. The truth is, is that it’s 10x easier to pick up a bunch of 6’s and 7’s who will fucking worship the ground you walk on, then to go out and get that amazing 9 after getting rejected 55 times in a row.

And since we’re talking about girlfriends, my point system isn’t referring to just looks.

The women you’re dating are probably too dumb for you, or not emotionally stable enough, along with being not quite as hot as you’d like.

To be my girlfriend, a woman has to hit acceptable levels physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. If they aren’t up to snuff in one or more categories, I either drop them like a bad habit, or just keep them as a fuck buddy (if they’re really hot).

Sounds like your issue is less with commitment and more with complacency. Time to raise the bar a couple notches.

If/When I do another “insta-vacation,” policy is going to be 2-3 days max. Things were glorious for the first 48 hours — practically dream-like. Third day was nice and homely. Fourth day saw her getting extremely attached (stage five clinger?), crying a lot, and there was a lot of friction and I felt a need to go.

I’m not sure what I could have done different other than limit the time together. Some women handle the bubble far better than others (I had an Aussie girl in Germany who managed our love-bubble like a pro; brilliant woman).

What I do know is that my growing hypothesis that any sort of traveling and/or distance completely distorts EVERYTHING involved in relationship expectations is true. Relationships are simply absurd or unreliable if there’s any sort of traveling or distance involved… People’s expectations and idealizations of one another go through the roof and it just creates all sorts of issues down the road.

I’ve got a lot of posts lined up dealing more with experiences with international women, relationships, and some readers questions. There will be a lot of updates over the next week or so.

My question is about a girl I’m trying to hook up with but I haven’t really dealt with this type of girl before and Im kinda lost.  She seems pretty prudish, definitely was a tom boy when she was younger (couldn’t tell that at all by looking at her) and still kinda has that mentality about her, and is also very smart.  Its the prudishness and tomboy-ness I don’t really know how to tackle… I also get the feeling like Im over gaming much of the time, whats a sure fire way of knowing if your over gaming a girl??

There are two questions in one here, and I’ll deal with them one at a time. The first is a great one, “How do I know if I’m overgaming a girl?” and the second has to do with personality types of women.

First, we have to define what “over-gaming” means. Over-gaming is basically when you are still hitting on a girl when she already likes you and it backfires.

For instance, the classic case of overgaming happens on dates. Guys will spend a lot of time and effort building attraction when they meet a woman and over the phone. Finally, they get there and the woman shows up on a date, but instead of moving things forward by escalating or entering into deeper rapport, they continue to try and tease/neg/disqualify/whatever-your-favorite-pua-tactic-is-today.

This ends up backfiring, as the girl is ready to move things forward, but is confused that you just keep flirting with her without doing anything else.

Women respond to this in a very ambivalent way… they’ll still flirt back with you (because they DO like you), but they’ll also become a bit frustrated by the whole situation, so they’ll pull back at times as well.

This ends up confusing a lot of lesser experienced guys because all the sudden it seems like this chick that was into them is getting annoyed by them.

Some here’s a checklist to know if you’re overgaming a girl:
1. You’ve been flirting with her for a long time and she’s flirted back, showing interest.
2. You have not escalated beyond very basic touching.
3. She’s suddenly giving you mixed signals — i.e., not returning calls, flaking on you when she didn’t used to, not flirting back like she used to.

The other part of your question that’s interesting has to do with the fact that she’s a bit of a “tomboy.”

A lot of times, women who have always had a lot of male friends or hung out with a lot of guys are hard to read. They kind of act like a guy in a lot of ways, so what would be considered flirting from a typical girl is just kind of a tomboy’s way of hanging out.

I’ve found that you typically need to be more aggressive and direct with these girls, as they’re not quite as savvy to the whole flirting and escalation thing. If you really like them, you need to make a strong move and usually they’ll get nervous (as they’re not used to being in such a feminine role) and either completely melt under you, or try to divert your advancements.

One of the main areas of female psychology that the pick up community hasn’t really touched is that of “personality types” and how it fits into how you should game a girl.

Over the years, living in Boston, I’ve bumped into Vin DiCarlo and his coaches here and there. And he’s actually spent the better part of the last year dedicated to this idea of personality types.

I’ve always been a big champion of the idea that no two guys are the same, so no two guys should game the exact same way.

Well, Vin has been coming at it from another angle: that no two WOMEN are the same, and so you can’t game them all the same. He’s come up with some brand new material, released just this week, based on the personality types of various women.

Check it out here

And if you think about it, we’re constantly talking about how “this girl is this type of girl, that girl is that type of girl, etc.” but no one’s ever taken the time to hone in on the exact psychological factors that go into these psychological factors.

A shy girl is not the same as the bubbly club girl is not the same as the intellectual girl at the library, etc.

I’ll be writing up another article soon elaborating on my thoughts about this. But if you want to check out some of Vin’s material on the subject (which you should), he’s giving away a free new ebook (only requires your email), which you can check it out here:

Vin DiCarlo’s New Female Psychological Profiles

The Greatest Feeling in the World is when you and a woman are so intimate emotionally, that the physical limitations of your body become stifling. You yearn to melt one another and mix yourselves into some kind of concoction. Sex is a by-product of this process; the ultimate act of physical intimacy. A last-ditch effort to become one with one-another.

When you have The Greatest Feeling in the World, logistics fall by the wayside. The idea of LMR is as absurd as returning money you just won in the lottery. Cockblocks, if they even existed, would be helpless to penetrate your new-found love-bubble. Creating an entire system and library of pick up theory around the banal goal of simply fucking, sells ourselves short. It goes much further than that. Move the goal posts back: aim for the Greatest Feeling in the World, and sex becomes merely a pleasurable side-effect.

It’s always been assumed that it took dating someone months or even years to reach this place. But it can be reached in a matter of hours. And she doesn’t even have to speak your language…

11PM: Buenos Aires. Tourist bar. Mostly Europeans and a few Americans (boring), but also a smattering of South American travelers (more interesting). Quality is mediocre. I seek out the hottest girl there. Found her. She looks Brazilian — as only Brazilians have a smorgasbord of mixed genetics like her. Upon further inspection, she is way, way over-dressed for this place (typical Brazilian behavior) and doesn’t shy away from eye contact when made (only Brazilian girls do this).

She’s talking to two guys. Can’t tell if they’re with her or if they just opened her. I’m busy scavenging for munchies, as I hadn’t eaten yet that night.

We catch eye contact again. Has to be Brazilian. I interrupt their conversation, “You must be Brazilian.” She smiles, “Yes, how did you know?” in broken English. The guys are definitely not with her. They try to remain engaged in the conversation, but it’s apparent within a few minutes that I’m the only one she wants to talk to. They each drop off within a few minutes.

1AM: Dancing. Spinning. Falling (figuratively, not literally). Light kissing. We’re inseparable now. The bubble is forming. No one else dares speak to us. We’re either dancing together, or I’m sitting with my arms wrapped around her. We physically don’t disconnect, ever.

She speaks A+ Portuguese, B+ Spanish and C- English; I speak A+ English, B- Spanish and D Portuguese. Conversations are a linguistic jungle-gym, falling in and out of all three languages. We don’t understand half the shit the other one says. But verbal mis-fires are more than compensated with smiles, eye contact and touch. Remember, the words don’t matter, only the emotions they create.

3AM: Leaving the club now. We lost track of the main group of tourists hours ago although we don’t really care. We made a token effort to figure out which bar they went to, but really it was an excuse for us to do something together. Taxi!

5AM: At my hostel, with my laptop, we buy tickets for a getaway at a beach resort about 5 hours outside Buenos Aires. We book a room on the beach together and plan on leaving the next day.

We’re on day three of our little tryst right now. This is the first time I’ve done an “insta-vacation” with a girl, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous going through with it. But it’s been fine, wonderful even. Our bubble is slowly fading, as the long days together have forced reality to set in a little bit. We’re not in love. We’re not going to get married and have a million babies. We probably won’t even keep in touch. And that’s OK.

But we still love each other’s company. We still laugh together, dance together in inappropriate places, and over-dress everywhere we go and make heads turn, as we are Brazilian and American, and that’s what we do.

On the beach, with her perfect body and tiny bikini (thong), she rubs sun tan lotion on me every afternoon. Every night, we bang and she lives up to the hype of every Brazilian stereotype I’ve heard.

I’m her “American Revolution,” she’s my “Capirinha.” We speak to each other in broken Spanish. We’re creating memories together. And for only a week, we occasionally share The Greatest Feeling in the World.

First of all… to anyone who has ever thought they’ve seen a big party, you haven’t seen shit. I’ve been to New Year’s Eve in Times Square, some of the biggest Halloween parties, 4th of July parades, etc. Nothing even came close. Mardi Gras? Please… Might as well be a Hallmark card.

Try to imagine this… 2.5 MILLION people partying and dancing in the streets. This is approximately 3-5 times the amount of people who show up for New Year’s Eve in Manhattan each year. It starts at about 3PM in the afternoon and doesn’t even begin to slow down until 5AM in the morning. Oh, and it goes for six straight days. The Brazilian equivalents of U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Coldplay, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Jay-Z, The Rolling Stones and Kanye West are all doing outdoor public concerts at different points during the week. Everyone is drunk and everyone is dancing more or less non-stop.

Now, beyond this being almost humanly impossible (I’m still trying to figure out what it is about Brazilians that lets them shake their asses for so well and for so long without collapsing of exhaustion), it’s completely impractical. COMPLETELY impractical. And this is coming from a guy who regularly calls 10-day ventures to Las Vegas “business trips.”

(Technical point: I attended Carnaval in the northern city of Salvador. The difference here is that Carnaval in the southern cities is more about the parades, the costumes and the events. The ones in the north are about the parties and music. All of the tourists and gringos usually go to the ones in the south in Rio and Sao Paulo… the Brazilians all go to the ones in the north, in Salvador and Fortaleza… partly to get away from all of the tourists and gringos who have now taken over Rio with their fanny packs, disposable cameras, bad sunburns.)

So on to the interesting part… the picking up Brazilian girls:

1) Brazilians are obscenely aggressive. As my friend and travel companion put it, “What constitutes flirting here would probably get you arrested in parts of the US.” And that’s not really an exaggeration. Guys would regularly OPEN girls by trying to make out with them, pulling their hair, grabbing them and just dragging them away, etc. This was normal and constant. A particularly hot girl may literally get guys grabbing her and trying to kiss her every 2-3 minutes.

As for the women, they are extremely aggressive as well… if they like you. You know that little eye contact game that US and European girls play with you? Where they may look at you, but if you make eye contact, they look away and pretend they didn’t see you, because it might demonstrate too much interest?

Yeah, Brazilians don’t have that. If a girl is looking at you and you look at her, she will stare you down like you’re a goddamn steak and she hasn’t eaten in months. Sometimes they’ll grab you, grab your ass, caress you — I had one girl follow me for a few blocks and tell me in her horrible English, “You are beautiful man.”

Pretty awesome, right? Well… one thing is universal, and that’s that the chicks who really want you are rarely the ones you want. Not to say ALL of the girls who did this to me were ugly, but uhh… yeah, most of them were… some of them exceedingly so.

2) The idea that all Brazilians are ridiculously hot is a myth. This will probably end up being a post of its own, but I describe the hotness of women in foreign countries in two different ways: mean attractiveness and range of attractiveness. For instance, the US has a very wide range of attractiveness with its women (hideously ugly to total smoke show, often in the same club), whereas continental Europe has a pretty narrow range: most of them are somewhat fit and decent-looking, but it’s rare to see one that just blows your mind.

Brazil has an EXTREMELY wide range. I saw some of the most ridiculously hot girls I’ve seen in months while I was there. I also saw tons of disgustingly hideous creatures. So I don’t think there’s any single blanket statement you can throw over them, as they vary widely. They DO tend to have amazing asses, and they all seem to be born with the ability to shake them better than any white girl ever could. Which is always cool.

3) Making out in Brazil is akin to a handshake. I figured this out the second night I was there, and for about an hour, it was an extremely exciting discovery, but it actually ended up bumming me out.

In a crowded environment with tons of Brazilian girls, machinegun-making out with girls is actually pretty damn easy. You can rack up 2-3 an hour without a whole lot of effort. Just walk around, catch eyes with girls staring at you. If they’re cute, approach them, spit the 2-3 sentences you know in Portuguese, grab her and start making out. Once in a while they head turn you. But rarely. One immediately mentioned having sex somewhere after a mere minutes (didn’t happen; see below).

But the makeout thing is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s fun because you can rack up like 12 makeouts in one night if you want. But on the other hand, since it’s so meaningless to them, it never leads anywhere. They almost always just kind of smile and walk away, not really caring either way what just happened.

4) Carnaval logistics are about as bad as they can possibly get. In a way, Carnaval is torture, because it presents you with literally an ENDLESS stream of hot Brazilian girls, for literally 12 hours a day for six days straight, but then offers more or less no possible way to pull them. The only exception I can think of is if you luck out and she knows English and you’re able to get her to invest in the interaction a bit, which I was never fortunate to stumble across.

With 2.5 million people in the streets, it’s unbearably packed in most streets. It’s impossible to move around and takes forever to get anywhere. Our apartment was literally a five minute walk from the parade route in daylight, but took 30-45 minutes to get there at night. Cabs are out of the question because of the crowd, and you constantly get separated from people because of the chaos.

Throw on top of that a SERIOUS language barrier and pushing anything further than about three minutes felt borderline impossible. And with so much mayhem and music going on, and little to no investment in you (making out means nothing, remember?), they get bored and scamper away.

Can you do an article on the casual relay train-wrecker known as Valentine’s Day? It is hauling ass smoke stacks visible on the horizon with a drunk conductor.

Yes, it’s that time of year again. When I was younger, I worked a summer in a plastic factory (don’t ask). There was this gruff old man who managed the shop — he’s was the dirty-old-man type, the kind of guy who probably gets drunk and grabs his friends’ daughter’s asses. Anyway, he would always ask me about what 18-year-old girl I was banging (answer at the time: none). But he told me once a wise piece of wisdom: “You dump them before Christmas and then pick them back up after Valentine’s Day. That way you don’t have to actually care about them…”

Yes, wise words… lol

Anyway, I think there are three different ways to approach the big “V-Day:”

Single guy — This is the easiest situation. GO OUT! Especially since Valentine’s Day is on a weekend this year. Valentine’s Day makes for easy pickings when you’re out — all of the most desperate and lonely girls are out in full force, and they’ve all had to sit around all day and listen to their friends talk about their boyfriends all day.

Casually Dating Multiple Women – If you’re casually dating a couple women or have a rotation going, Valentine’s Day might as well be the worst day of the year. On the one hand, if you do anything with any of your girls, you’re sending quick and immediate boyfriend expectations. On the other hand, if you go out prowling around and your women catch wind of it, they’ll immediately recognize you aren’t commitment material for them and it could have some adverse effects (depending on your relationship status with each girl).

The answer? Stay inside. Don’t leave the house. Get some work done around the house, read a nice book, watch a nice movie. Take the day as a holiday to yourself. Believe it or not, I’ve spent most Valentine’s Days in the past years alone in doors.
One, because I’m not really a fan of holidays in any shape or form, but also because I just didn’t want to deal with any sort of expectations my actions would set with all the women I was seeing.

In a Committed Relationship – Ugh, I hate this shit, don’t you? Valentine’s Day, Christmas and birthdays. I’ll be honest, I’ve never been that great at buying girlfriends gifts and I’ve always tended to only commit to girls who are pretty lax about this stuff. So fair warning: I’m not the most qualified guy in this department.

But the general guidelines for any sort of gift is that showing thought is 100x more important than what you do or how much money you spend.

Guys often make the mistake of assuming that there’s some sort of pre-ordained “romance” ritual to Valentine’s Day — fancy dinner, romantic movie, wine, chocolate, blah, blah, blah… That’s really nice if you want to do it.

But honestly, women appreciate it when you show your imagination and think about them so much more than any stereotypical “romantic night.”

Bonus points if whatever you do shows that you listen to them.

But when in doubt, chocolate, sexy underwear, homemade (and sappy) cards and wine are all pretty safe bets.

Godspeed….

Of course, as usual, I felt obliged to step in and crush everyone’s dreams.

But seriously, I felt a lot of these guys were getting mixed up so I posted the following:

–

I don’t want to take anything away from your realization, it’s an important one. A lot of guys get the impression from this stuff that you basically always start at zero and have to build attraction from scratch, when that’s not true at all.

But going the other way and claiming attraction is “instant” isn’t correct either.

Attraction is always changing. Coming and going. It’s not static and it’s not an all or nothing deal.

All sorts of things can cause a woman to be attracted to you. Your clothes. Your posture. Your clever jokes. Your interesting stories. The way you touch her. Your haircut. The time of the month. Your job. Your passions and hobbies. Your confidence and self-awareness. The way you laugh. Your beliefs. The way you look into her eyes…

You get the point… I could go on forever…

Some of these things are “instant.” For instance, if you’re 6′3″ and built like Drago from Rocky IV, that’s pretty instant attraction. But if you have brilliant, yet ironic humor, a Ph.D in Physics and used to save starving kids in Sudan in your spare time — well, that’s also attractive, but there’s nothing instant about it. She finds out about it as your identity unfolds throughout the interaction.

In seminars, I refer to these things as “passive” attraction and “active” attraction. A concept that’s actually spread quite a bit in the past two years.

Attraction comes and goes. Sometimes it’s there immediately and you lose it over time (minutes, months, years). Other times it’s not there to begin with, but you slowly build it over time (again, minutes, months, years). But as people in this thread have pointed out… the sooner you build it, the more permanent it seems to be.

First, I’d like to address what low self-esteem is, since I think that it’s misunderstood a lot of times.

What most guys perceive self-esteem to be is how touchy a woman is about certain topics. For instance, she may be confident in her looks, but if you make fun of her checkbook, she’ll get incredibly insecure.

I think these are just natural levels of security and confidence that everybody has, low self-esteem or not. There are very high self-esteem people who are socially anxious and very low self-esteem people who are confidence with their bank accounts.

Self esteem is a much deeper concept. I think it’s a deep, sub-conscious perception of one’s value.

For instance, a girl could be very confident in her work and with her friends, but continues to be manipulative in her relationships, date guys who treat her like shit and consistently depressed.

At the same time, you could have a girl who can’t manage money to save her life, is very nervous and awkward around other people, but is consistently happy, has happy and loving relationships and friendships, a healthy family life and a generally very positive outlook on life.

As a commenter pointed out, we all have our flaws and insecurities… the question of self esteem is how many of us ACCEPT our own flaws and insecurities. Generally, those of us who were raised in a healthy and loving environment do because our family accepted us, warts and all.

This is why women with low self esteem seek out men who treat them like shit and sabotage relationships with men who treat them well.

It’s because they believe they are shit. They believe, deep down and sub-consciously, that they’re shitty human beings.

So the guy who treats her like a queen has to either a) not realize how shitty she is or b) be shit himself. So she sabotages her relationship with him.

But a man who treats her like shit must see her for who she is… in fact, deep down she secretly believes she deserves to be treated like this, so she sticks with him.

I honestly don’t think PUA tactics have much effect on this, as PUA tactics are very-much a surface-level component of the interaction.

Negs and teases don’t ever really touch a girl’s self esteem, they just manipulate the perception of social value. You teasing her on her checkbook makes you seem like you have a little bit more value in that department, but it doesn’t ever change how she feels about herself or how you change about yourself.

It may just trigger feelings that are already there.

What IS true is that inner game will always match inner game. Guys who have low self-esteem will naturally attract and enter relationships with women who feel shitty about themselves.

Men with high self esteem will naturally attract and end up with women with high self esteem.

PUA tactics don’t influence this much. A guy with low self-esteem will use PUA tactics in a manipulative, selfish way — which will turn off all women except those who don’t respect themselves and their boundaries — therefore getting them a LSE woman.

Men with high self esteem will use PUA tactics to generate win-win situations, to accentuate the virtues of their own personalities and attract women who appreciate and value those virtues and vice-versa.

As for how can you tell if a woman has low self-esteem?

Here are some clear signals, and also instant deal-breakers for me with women:

- Excessively needy behavior: calls you multiple times a day, demands all of your time and attention. Doesn’t respect your boundaries or your “me” time — particularly if she does this early on. A long-term girlfriend who does this is kind of a different story (but still low self esteem).

- Extreme (irrational) jealousy and/or (irrational) anger towards you. For instance, if she gets upset that you spend more time playing your guitar than hanging out with her… uhh… yeah.

- Manipulative behavior. For instance, if she EVER does something with the intention of making me jealous. I don’t mean the little things girls do for attention, but something like ditching me when we’re out together because some guy is buying her shots and she’s obviously doing it so that I’ll get jealous and fight for her attention again. I’m done. Hell, I’ve walked out of dates after an hour because of crap like this.

- A huge sense of entitlement and selfishness coupled with a lack of self-awareness. For instance, a girl who makes EVERYTHING about her all the time, even when things have nothing to do with her… a girl who is incredibly selfish and completely oblivious to it.

- She’s addicted to drama and conflict. If there’s a lack of drama and conflict in her life, she creates it somehow — whether consciously or unconsciously.

- An inordinately negative woman: pessimistic, talks a lot of shit, “hates” a lot of people and things, and generally seems sad and depressed a lot.

- She either lies consistently or lies about major things you should not lie about.

Unfortunately, LSE women tend to ALWAYS be amazing in bed. I still haven’t figured out why this is — but I think it has to do with a lot of pent up emotion or something.

They’re also experts at emotionally manipulating you. You have to be very careful. They’re amazingly good at catching you in their web and pulling on your emotional strings to keep you from getting away. Never underestimate their ability to do this.

A long time ago, I dated a number of LSE women. One of them it took me a good year to finally get away from. Every time I thought I was getting away, she’d come up with something HUGE that would suck me back in: a guy trying to rape her, her friend from high school dying, telling me she’ll have threesomes with me, etc.

The thing is, after a while, I didn’t know if I could believe her anymore. And just the mere fact that a girl is crying over a friend dying and I have no idea if she just made this up or not, tells me there’s a serious problem.

But then again, I didn’t have the self-esteem to stand up for myself and tell her no more, set my boundaries and kick her out of my life.

Live and learn…