How to not become emotionally invested in women

I hate it when people try to oversimplify pick-up, but if I had to boil down pick up into one principle every man should understand, it is this: The woman must be more emotionally invested in you than you are in her at every stage of the relationship. I call this the IRON LAW OF SEDUCTION.

Understanding and correctly applying this law will solve 99% of the problems men have with women. She’s not responsive to your advances? Not emotionally invested enough. Not returning your calls? Not emotionally invested enough. Flaking? Not emotionally invested enough. On the flipside, as a man, if you emotionally divest yourself from girls, you solve most your own problems. Outcome dependent? You are too emotionally invested in getting laid. Approach anxiety? You are too emotionally invested in the success of the interaction. Neediness and desperation? You are emotionally invested in getting girls. Suck at conversations? You are too emotionally invested in getting laid and can’t just have a regular conversation.

Emotional investment is subconsciously communicated and women evolved to sense it. One guy can talk to a girl all night without her feeling like he is emotionally invested, but another can talk to her for 2 seconds and get auto-rejected for being too invested. Of course, a woman may talk to you, hang out with you, fuck you, or even date you for a long time if she’s not emotionally invested because she’s horny, crazy, lonely, desperate, drunk, bored, want something from you, etc.... But if she’s not emotionally invested, you are on thin ice and vulnerable at any time to flaking or going cold.

What is emotional investment?

Emotional investment is occupying one’s thoughts and emotions. It is not the same as being interested or “liking” somebody. I “like” a lot of people but I don’t “feel” anything for them and it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if they rejected me or even died. This distinction is why women flake. Women “like,” get “interested,” and give their numbers to lots of guys, but if she is not at least a little emotionally invested she will not be motivated to get out of bed, put on her make-up, and come somewhere to meet you. Unlike men, women get invited to shit all the time by guys they “like” so they are not going to care about meeting you unless there is some emotional investment.

Think about emotional investment like this: like most men, you probably like Lamborghinis. But like most men, you probably don’t have one, and you probably don’t spend all day thinking about Lamborghinis and being sad because you don’t have one. But if I lent you a Lamborghini for two months and you drove it around, took care of it, showed it off to your friends, and got laid because of it, you would be sad when I take it back. It’s irrational, but you would get emotionally invested in the Lambo even if you weren’t sad when you never had one. Because you became attached to it and it gave you a sense of identity and power, the Lambo took up space in your thoughts and emotions, making you emotionally invested.

Emotional investment in people is similar. Being around somebody awesome and feeling like they “belong” to you becomes addictive like crack. An awesome man makes a woman feel special, loved, important, powerful, and cool. An awesome man is also fun, positive, confident, carefree, and dominant, easing the woman’s anxieties and insecurities. Being around an awesome guy is literally like a drug to women, and if they are around you long enough, they become hooked.

The Ben Franklin Theory

Ben Franklin, one of America’s founding fathers and greatest poonhounds, famously and counterintuitively discovered that if person A does something for person B, person A will like person B more. Most people would assume the opposite – if you want people to like you, you should do things for them, so person B should like person A more! Right? Wrong!

Person A “likes” person B more because person A has become emotionally invested. Maybe person A subconsciously expects person B to do something nice back. Maybe person A subconsciously see themselves as “beneath” person B in the ape hierarchy. Maybe person A is protecting their own ego – person B must be somebody special if even I did something for them! Or maybe the simple act of doing something for person B caused person B to enter person A’s thoughts and emotions.

Whatever the psychological mechanism, when a woman really likes you, she will WANT to do stuff for you, sometimes even aggressively, and she will WANT to emotionally invest while you fantasize about other things. When a woman really likes you is when you realize that needy, supplicating, validating behavior is not necessary. I have friends that are strippers, and their job is basically to hustle men out of money and to trick guys into buying shit for them. I don’t buy girls things, ever, (and I never, ever visit my friends at work) and I notice that when these strippers start to like me they buy me shit, clean my house, do me favors, etc... One night I even got into an argument with a stripper because she bought me 5 drinks in a row and she wouldn’t let me buy her a drink in return. That’s emotional investment.

The Woujo Theory

According to my corollary of the Franklin theory, supplicating to a woman, validating yourself to a woman, buying a woman things, following a woman around, allowing a woman to treat you like shit, and spending too much time trying to “help” a woman who doesn’t deserve it subconsciously will cause you to become emotionally invested in her and feel “beneath” her.

Sometimes guys will do loserish things, like let a girl treat them badly or repeatedly pursue a girl who doesn’t care about them, and justify it by saying “I don’t really care about her, I just want to fuck.” This is a bad idea, because even though you consciously think you “don’t give a fuck,” by pursuing her, you become emotionally invested, and by allowing her treat you like shit, you subconsciously re-wire your brain to feel like a beta male. Even if you didn't give a fuck before, now you do.

You can’t control how you feel, but you can control what you do. Where your actions go, your feelings will follow, and where feelings go, your thoughts will follow. If you do loser things, you will eventually feel like a loser, even if you consciously tell yourself you “don’t give a fuck.” If a hot girl tries to strike a Faustian bargain with you and let you fuck her in return for treating you like shit, you must reject that deal out of respect for your own mental health.

Your brain works by making connections, and when you focus your thoughts and emotions on something, your brain starts connecting that thing to other things in your brain, and that thing becomes “enmeshed” in your wiring, creating a deeper web that is hard to untangle. For example, if you date a really hot girl, your brain will start to associate her with sexual pleasure, or ego, or fun times, and other things you like, so when she dumps you, you will think of her constantly.

The definition of “not giving a fuck” is only keeping positive thoughts and emotions in your head, and cutting out people, places, activities, thoughts, media, etc... that are negative. “Not giving a fuck” is not about being cold, aloof, an asshole, or stupid, but by filing your thoughts and emotions only with positive things that deserve to be there.

Why is emotional investment unattractive?

Emotional investment is an immediate turn-off. It doesn’t matter why, but I can guess some reasons.

First, emotional investment is unattractive because people are attracted to lives that are more interesting, exciting, higher, and better than our own. We just assume that somebody living a better life than us is going to be thinking and feeling about their awesome life, not us. If a woman knows she occupies your thoughts and emotions, she will assume your life sucks. She wants to fixate her thoughts and emotions on something higher, but if your thoughts and emotions are fixated on her, she’s back where she started.

For example, a girl that plays soccer will be attracted to guys that are better at soccer than her because they will appeal to the part of her thoughts and emotions that are invested in soccer. I'm not saying she will never become emotionally invested in a guy who is worse at soccer than she is - she may invest in a guy for other reasons - but the guy is playing with a disadvantage.

Second, emotional investment is unattractive because, simply put, emotions are bad and scary. Our society acts like “love” is an emotion and “our true selves” are our emotions, but that’s bullshit. Our value lies in what we can do when we are rational, what we’ve learned in our life, what we know how to do, and what we strive to achieve and be when we are clear-headed. Emotions are temporary and fleeting; but true love is a rational, credible commitment to your beloved’s well-being. In his dialogue the Phaedrus, the Greek philosopher Plato said that emotional love is a kind of madness – when things are going well, you are irrationally nice to the person out of proportion to what they deserve. When things are going badly, you are irrationally nasty to the person out of proportion to what they deserve. Women know that when you are irrationally nice to them you will eventually be irrationally shitty.

Most of our emotions are selfish, irrational, unrealistic, uncontrollable, and oftentimes downright evil. Emotions are fundamentally needy: they always want something, even if the “want” is to help somebody. If you see a beautiful woman and think “I like her, and I want to make her happy and do nice things for her,” you’re lying to yourself. You want things FROM her. You want to fuck her, use her for an ego boost, have your friends see you with her, and make yourself feel better for being a “good person.” You don’t want to see her run off and be happy with another guy, you want her to be unhappy with you. When you show emotion women subconsciously know you want something and that puts pressure on them, and they run away. Women sometimes will hang out with guys they don’t like or aren’t attracted to in any way, just because those guys are not emotionally invested and are not putting any pressure on them.

When you become extremely emotional, you fantasize about getting your beloved back or hurting them for the wrongs they did to you, you stalk them, you act weird, you feel depressed, you can’t function, etc… Love songs glorify these feelings, but these are not healthy feelings. They are signs of weakness. Women have these feelings things too (oftentimes much more deeply than men), and they know it’s a scary pit to be in, so if they sense for even a second that a man is feeling these things (or is even just slightly beginning to feel these things), they run away immediately. Women want an emotional rock. They want the lifeguard on the edge of the pool pulling them out, not somebody drowning with them.

Women also take longer to get emotionally invested in men than men take to get emotionally invested in women. Men evolved to seek “fertile” women (big ass, big tits, healthy face) to impregnate as soon as possible. Women, on the other hand, evolved to find the strongest man in the tribe that could protect her and her baby, so they seek a larger group of traits, many of which are long-term traits (confidence, dominance, emotional stability, intelligence, etc…). It takes a woman time to figure out if a guy has these traits but a man can immediately be attracted to a hot girl. In every man-woman relationship there is a period of time where the man is emotionally invested, but the woman is still “rational” and feeling the guy out. Many men fuck it up here – they start acting creepy, or weird, overly nice, overly fixated, and the woman, who feels nothing, thinks the guy isweird or worse.

Of course, emotions are a part of life and can be beautiful if channeled correctly. But you shouldn’t show your emotions to a woman until she has also developed those emotions.

Third, emotional investment makes you stupid and saps you of your vitality and awesomeness. Tons interesting, smart, funny, cool, successful guys become vacant shells of their normal selves around women, partly because their thoughts and emotions are empty of everything that makes them awesome. If you are deep in a game of chess and I try to have a conversation with you about quantum physics you will sound stupid because your thoughts and emotions are full of chess. Seduction requires intelligence and creativity, but if your thoughts and emotions are just “durr, she’s a pretty woman” you’re going to fail. Because women are “rational” longer than men, they want to have rational, intelligent conversations about interesting shit.

Another reason is power. It’s a sad fact of life, but humans are wired to look at relationships in power terms. We subconsciously rank everybody in a particular social situation from least to most powerful. Women are much more aware of the power dynamic because they are generally less powerful than men. And unfortunately, we subconsciously see emotional people as lower in the power hierarchy. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche said, correctly in my opinion, that individuals higher in the social hierarchy do not feel emotions for people lower than them. The lower ranked apes evolved to obey and be obsessed with the alpha male because they need his protection and resources, but the alpha male feels nothing for the lower ranked apes because he does not need them for anything.

Most importantly, women are not attracted to emotionally invested men because women are attracted to RESILIENCE. Resilience here means “the ability to confidently pursue your goals and not let anything or anybody perturb you.”

Women are attracted to resilience because they naturally want a protector, and a protector’s commitment is only credible if he cannot be thrown off of his mission, whatever that mission is. If a protector becomes emotional, dishonest, distracted, or submissive, he can no longer be trusted to protect. We subconsciously see emotional people as weak because they can be easily controlled. If a guy is emotional about a girl, he is likely to agree with whatever she says, let her get away with bad behavior, etc…

If a protector wavers for even a second, the woman becomes anxious and fearful, but a confident man with boundaries is not scared and cannot be thrown off of his mission. You must be a brick wall that cannot be moved or affected: if you approach her or escalate with her, it is purely based on your own desire, not her cajoling. At every moment you should think to yourself “am I doing this because I want to or because I am trying to impress her”? Sometimes you need to monitor her emotional investment on a moment-by-moment basis.

Subconscious communication

Women can quickly sense by your body language, words, demeanor, tone of voice and actions whether you are emotionally invested. Neither you nor her may consciously know you’re invested, but you will just “feel” unattractive to her. Sometimes very subtle changes in behavior (staring too long, asking a question that is too intrusive too early) can tip off that you are too invested.

I use the “gravity theory” to gauge emotional investment. In social settings, high-value people are “bigger” and therefore “draw” lower-value people to them. If you look at any party, you will see hot girls usually in the center, relaxing and having fun, and guys literally surrounding them like planets around the sun. There is a reason these guys are called “orbiters.” If the girl gets up to leave, the guys may play it cool for a while, but they then get up to follow her. Your ultimate goal is to become the center of gravity so women are drawn to you, not vice versa, which is hard, because as a man you must approach. But even if you approach your demeanor and body language can exude the message of “I am the center of gravity, and I create a rip in space-time that compels you to come to me.”

The subconscious subtext of an interaction is 99%. For example, the sentence “can I buy you a drink” can have a wide range of subconscious meanings depending on the tone, body language, context and emotion I deliver them in. “Can I buy you a drink” can mean “I want to fuck you,” “I feel like I owe you something and I want to pay you back,” “I’m a generous guy and I like to just people free things,” “you’re a good friend, and I want to show my appreciation,” “I’m a loser and I want to make you like me by buying you things,” etc… What matters is not your superficial words, but your subconscious context.

Because seduction is mostly subconscious, I can’t teach you every detail of the walk, speaking style, body language, demeanor, etc… of a guy who is not emotionally invested. Even if I did, it’s too much for you to remember and process. I even doubted the efficacy of writing this article because it’s incredibly hard to “fake” an emotional state for a long period of time and most people will go back to behaving like what they feel they are.

The paradox of escalation

So far it sounds like the right solution to get girls would be to just ignore them completely. You won’t look emotionally invested, right? Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. It is the man’s responsibility to approach and escalate because women do not get emotionally invested quickly and are afraid of rejection.

To get a girl attracted to you, you must show at least some initial interest and escalate, luring her into becoming emotionally invested in you. Magicians use a technique called “forcing,” where they trick the person into thinking they are picking a random card out of the deck when the person is really picking the card the magician wanted them to pick. Seduction is similar: she should feel like she is picking you, not vice-versa. You are just opening the door to her.

The challenge of seduction

Seducing a woman while you appear not emotionally invested is incredibly challenging. First, women’s aversion to emotional investment is mostly subconscious – consciously, women want the guy to show at least some interest. And it’s naturally hard to hang around a woman you like for a long period of time and not become invested to at least some degree. Beautiful women create a reality distortion field where men lose all concept of rationality, truth, normal standards of right and wrong, etc… You can say “you’re overthinking this, just be yourself,”, but women touch men’s strongest emotion, so many men literally forget how be themselves. When a beautiful woman walks into a nightclub a swarm of otherwise successful, rational, manly men immediately lose their fucking minds. They start begging for her approval, trying to buy her things, acting stupid, etc…

And like I said earlier, men emotionally invest quicker than women, so we must be patient because our emotions push us to jump the gun and get right into lovey-dovey mode. And in non-romantic contexts, people become emotionally invested at the same rate, so you are used to the other person feeling the same as you if the interaction is going well. And when we feel emotionally invested in somebody, we naturally are going to want to elicit a positive emotional response. But trying to make a woman happy that is not emotionally invested comes off as validation-seeking, supplicating, bitch behavior. You must instead do what is RIGHT. A woman may seem cold, and we may think we can “warm her up” by being “nice” to her, but we should really just pursue our mission and have faith that she will emotionally invest even though she appears on the surface to not be attracted or care about you. Remember: women are constantly sizing you up, so even if they don’t look like they are attracted or paying attention, they are.

Seduction is a gamble because you must have faith that eventually the woman will start to emotionally invest, knowing she might not. Sometimes she just won’t like you. Sometimes she just wants attention. Sometimes she is in love with you but won’t let it on. Some women are damaged and never emotionally invest in anybody – they see all men as objects to be used. This is why you must assume attraction – because you DON’T KNOW.

How to not be emotionally invested

If you take away one thing from this article, it is this: a woman who is not yet invested in you must not occupy a big part of your thoughts and emotions. You must have your mind and heart on other things when interacting with women. Period. If she hasn’t made room for you in her head and heart yet, you shouldn’t make space for her in your head and heart. If you make this change right now, I promise your results will instantly improve. Women are the dessert to a good life, not the main course, and that’s how women should feel when you are talking to them. WOMEN WANT TO BE DESSERT.

Here are my main steps to not becoming emotionally invested:

1) Realize you don’t need to emotionally invest

2) Have an interesting and awesome life that occupies your thoughts and emotions.

3) Have “abundance mentality” with respect to women.

4) Have boundaries and be unperturbable.

5) Focus on your own fun first.

Realize you don’t need to emotionally invest

This may be the most important step. I think a lot of guys emotionally invest in girls because society and pop culture subconsciously make us think that for a man to get a girl, he must supplicate to her and emotionally invest in her. In the movies, the confident, successful guy living his own life never gets the girl; instead the winner is the beta loser who falls in love with her from afar, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to “get” her, enduring multiple rejections and humiliations. These movies also teach that women are delicate flowers that need constant coddling and lovey dovey bullshit. That’s not how it works in the real world.

Men also misunderstand women’s aversion to rejection. Women have a strong need to be “accepted” (as all betas do) and therefore are much more sensitive to rejection than men. The phrase “hell hath no fury like a woman scorned” is true. Dread game and “ignoring” women only works if she is ignoring you first. But if you outright reject her, or if she makes a move on you, or asks for acceptance, and you say “no” or she feels like you are ignoring her there is a strong chance she will emotionally “un-invest.” Because women have this strong need for constant acceptance and validation, men mistakenly think they must emotionally invest. But all you really need to do is not reject her or make her feel excluded. It’s a thin line between keeping a woman “accepted” and emotionally investing in her.

To win this game, you should only do something for a woman if the woman would do it for you. If you want to buy her a drink, think about whether she would buy you a drink. If she wouldn’t, don’t. If she wants you to wait for her, think about whether she would wait for you. If she wouldn’t, don’t. If there is a girl you always say hi to, but she never says hi to you, stop saying hi to her. She knows who you are, she can say hi to you. It’s ok to “win” in relationships.

Again, this is easier said than done. Society and your emotions team up to make you feel like you need to follow girls around, wait for them, put up with their bullshit, buy them drinks, etc… You must fight your feelingss and social training and have faith that if you stay the course women will become attracted. This requires the ability to say “no” to a woman (saying “no” is different than rejecting her) and the ability to walk away from her, even permanently.

Have an interesting and awesome life that occupies your thoughts and emotions

Humans are wired to seek good feelings. If the main part of our life is not making us happy (job, school, our hobbies), we get those good feelings from other sources: drugs, trashy TV, women, food, etc… All those things are not bad by themselves, but if your regular life doesn’t make you happy, you will overly emotionally invest in bad things and become addicted and depressed. If your life is miserable, you will subconsciously and unknowingly immediately start overly investing in women.

I use the “cheese pizza method.” Whenever I feel like I’m getting too emotional, I fill my thoughts and emotions with something I love – cheese pizza, Oreo cheesecake, the day I did mushrooms at the beach, reading about dinosaurs stoned, etc... This clears my head and allows me to act “normal” around women. When I am thinking about doing something for a girl I ask myself “what has she done to dislodge cheese pizza out of my heart and mind?” You can replace cheese pizza with anything, ideally an incredible, thrilling life that she would want to join.

Have abundance mentality with respect to girls

No matter how awesome your life is, it is hard to not emotionally invest in girls. Abundance mentality is when your thoughts and emotions are full of other women, so you don’t need this one girl. If you don’t have other girls, you need to delude yourself. I recall times when I did have abundance and put myself back in that mental space. If you’ve never had abundance, imagine you are Brad Pitt or some other celebrity and think about how he would feel and act.

Have boundaries and be unperturbable

Women want you to be an immovable wall that confidently and joyfully pursues his mission. She will try to perturb you from that mission, not because she wants to see you fail, but because she wants to test whether you are actually a brick wall or a façade for something softer. The same way you knock on a desk at the furniture store to see if it is real wood, a woman shit tests you to see if you are actually confident enough to pursue your mission or if you will be perturbed. And the more confident and immovable you are, the stronger the shit tests become. This is true even if the mission is getting her! As long as she is into it, you need to escalate as if you already know she will say yes.

Your mission, when out, should be maximum fun. She should sense that your emotional investment is “where’s the party? Where’s the next fun thing?” You should have a plan for the entire night: I’m going to X, then I’m going to Y , etc… You should not let the woman hijack your plans and take the lead. Your primary mission (career, hobbies, etc…) should also be in your head. Remember the song “girls just wanna have fun?” In truth, everybody just wants to have fun but boys are wracked with anxiety because they are trying to impress girls. Whenever you are feeling nervous, scared, anxious or like you are emotionally investing too much in a girl, just say to yourself “I’m here to have fun. If you contribute, great. If not, you are dismissed.” Fun and positivity always win.

Example: If a beautiful woman is talking about something incredibly boring most men pretend to be interested. Wrong! Women know when they are being boring and it is sometimes a subtle shit test to see if you will let her get away with it. Women are not desperate for sex and they do not need to hang around if a guy is being boring, stupid or mean, and they cannot respect or empathize with a guy who would put up with bullshit from her. Men let women be boring when they lose their vision of the good life. A good life involves beautiful women, but it also involves interesting conversations. If you aren’t getting interesting conversations from her, you would leave because you have options. Whenever a woman is being boring, I change the subject just to let her know I don’t tolerate bullshit.

By having a vision of the good life, boundaries, and confidence that your life, thoughts and emotions are interesting and valuable, you can challenge and stimulate a woman. Women want a man that will help them grow and introduce them to a better life and more interesting world than the one they currently inhabit. They don’t want some a that agrees with everything they say, a pushover, or a simple-minded conformist. Women want a guy who is willing to walk away at any time, not because he is some cold-hearted psychopath, but because once a man shows that is he NOT willing to walk away at any time, there is no challenge or growth.

Of course, for most of you, this is very difficult. Many of you have uninteresting lives so a beautiful woman would instantly become the most interesting and important thing your life or you are so sex starved and desperate that you don’t care if a woman is being boring, or mean, or uninterested, or whatever.

Focus on your own fun first

Imagine you paid $500,000 to spend a week with Leonardo DiCaprio (or whatever celebrity you think lives an awesome life) and when you get there Leonardo says “tell us what we should do?” You would say “I don’t know, what are the options?” and Leo goes “I don’t have anything planned – let’s just do what you were gonna do.” You would be pissed! You want to become part of Leo’s awesome life, not make your own plan. That’s how girls feel when men don’t have a plan. They want to join your life, not lead you around in their life. That’s why you need to focus on your own fun first. You may like you are being rude or selfish, but you’re not, because women are more attracted to the act of leading than the destination necessarily.

How to make her emotionally invest in you

For a woman to emotionally invest in you, certain shit must happen:

1) She must “like” you – i.e., she must find you pleasant, friendly, good-looking, compatible with her values and interests.

2) She must feel an emotional connection with you.

3) She must feel accepted by you. If she you are rejecting her, ignoring her, or being hostile, she will not emotionally invest.

4) She must watch you be confident and resilient.

5) She needs to spend time around you.

She must like you

This one is self-explanatory. Women are usually not going to invest in you if you don’t share their interests, values, goals, etc… Some girls want a rapper covered in tattoos, others want a nerdy guy who watches Star Wars. If you’re a versatile guy with lots of interests, a lot more women will like you, but some people just aren’t compatible.

She must feel an emotional connection with you

The key to developing an emotional connection with a girl is experiencing emotionally exciting things together. The ultimate is of course, passionate sex, but a good concert, a deep conversation, even a beer pong game you guys play together can help build an emotional connection.

Another way to build an emotional connection is for her to vicariously experience your confidence. She wants you to be her emotional rock, so she would like to project her insecurities and fears onto you, and watch you brush them off as if they were nothing. She also wants to watch you take the lead and make the night fun.

A woman has emotional energy, and that energy must be directed towards something or somebody. You want that energy to be directed to you. The easiest way to do this is just by spending time around her. Just “being around” will help build attraction as long as you are not fucking it up by being needy or making her feel bad. The best way to get women to like you is to be “forced” to be around them, such as work or a group hangout, where you do not supplicate to them or validate yourself to them. My friend used to take girls out on his boat, and these girls would usually end up liking me by the end of the day because we would have spent all day together. Celebrities get so much tang because women watch them in movies or listen to their music and become emotionally invested, whereas the celebrity shows the women no emotional investment in all.

She must feel accepted by you.

Again, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, so it must feel like the door to you is open. As she invests in you more, you must escalate more. You can fuck this up by being an asshole, not being sensitive to her emotions, and not reading her advances correctly.

She must watch you confidently pursue your goals

The word confidence comes from the Latin con (with) + fidens (faith). A man with confidence has faith that he will succeed in whatever he does and cannot be stopped by anybody. Women get turned by watching a man confidently pursue his mission. Why are women w so attracted to DJs, promoters, and drug dealers in the club? Those guys aren’t exactly the “cream” of society. It’s because those guys are the only people at the club actually doing something. All the other guys are just sitting there drooling over the girls, instantly reducing their attractiveness.

Putting it all together

To apply all this knowledge, my strategy is to adopt a rational, almost businesslike demeanor, at least in the early stages of the interaction. As I said earlier, women are “rational” at the beginning before they are emotionally invested, so you should also be rational. A man must act almost like he is a woman: he is interested in a relationship (or maybe even just sex) but he has high standards and must evaluate the woman thoroughly first and make sure she is suitable before he gets emotionally invested. You should act like your actions are guided by a seduction computer that makes all the decisions based on the available information, not your emotions.

One technique is called “disinterested interest.” Your rational words should show interest and enthusiasm but you must communicate the “emotion” of “I’m just talking to you to be nice, I am not totally emotionally invested in you yet and I could walk away at any moment.” The best way to do this is by keeping your thoughts and emotions focused on something else, other than her.

You should not, however, stay completely rational. You must allow yourself to show your emotions about things that are not her: your passions, your interests, your friends, etc… And you can show emotion towards her if she deserves it: laugh if she says something funny, thank her if she does something nice, sympathize with her if she says something sad: just don’t let on that you feel emotional about “her” unconnected to anything she is or has done.

And of course, escalate sexually. Paradoxically, it is possible to escalate sexually and not appear emotionally invested. In fact, a lot of women (especially damaged ones) are looking for emotionless sex. You must touch her, you must turn the conversation sexual, you must do “seductive” things like look into her eyes and whisper in her ear, etc… And you must confidently take the lead in the conversation and the situation in general, leading her from place to place, getting intimate with her, etc… And when she starts to emotionally invest, make her feel like you MIGHT emotionally invest too (but not as much as her). Sometimes if you play it “too” cool she will think you just like her platonically or that you lost interest.

A broader view

This article is obviously about getting girls, but the principles are applicable in all areas of your life. Simply put, you should not invest your thoughts and emotions into people, places, institutions, and activities that do not give a fuck about you and/or do not produce a return that equals the investment you put into them. One of the biggest mistakes people make is investing too much in their job, friendship, hobbies, etc..., and getting 0 out of it.

Additionally, whatever you do becomes your emotional investment. If you spend every weekend hanging out with piece of shit people that just do drugs, complain and make bad decisions, guess what, you are now becoming a piece of shit person. You are what you do.