posted
01/26/12
From your buddies to your mom to your best female friend, everyone and their dog thinks they have great dating advice for you. And some people actually do. But perhaps more important than getting quality advice is identifying bad advice—and rejecting it before you get slapped, dumped or worse. The following ideas, no matter how cleverly phrased, can only lead you down a dark path. If you want your love life to be more George Clooney, less Kris Humphries, turn a deaf ear.
1. “Catch Her Off Guard”
No. Don’t. She doesn’t want a challenge. Not yet. She wants pursuit. It’s true that “Do you come here often?” makes for a really crap-tastic pickup line. What’s not true is that you need some kind of exotic icebreaker to get her interested. Just ask something that engages her, like what she thinks the beer from that goose-shaped tap tastes like, or whether the bartender’s handlebar moustache is ironic or sincere. The harder you try to be “witty” or “edgy” the more you’re just going to come off as weird or a douche.
Playing on a woman’s irrational side is fine if you’re looking for wild sex with a psycho chick who’ll torch your car when things go south. For something a little more stable, you’ve got to honestly pursue both her heart and her mind.
2. “Give Her a Neg”
In pickup artist parlance, “negging” is using a backhanded compliment to put yourself on a higher plane than a woman so that she feels she has to win your approval. It’s probably the worst advice you’re ever going to get from a pickup artist, and that’s a pretty high bar to begin with. Telling some girl her nails are a mess or she’s wearing too much makeup isn’t a good way to get her to like you. The only ladies who fall for this move are the ones you don’t to want to get mixed up with in the first place.
3. “Women Are Emotional”
It’s not that women aren’t emotional. Everyone is emotional to some degree. However, banking on her lack of common sense while dating is not only sort of piggish, it’s also not going to get you any closer to being intimate with her. Much like negging, playing on a woman’s irrational side is fine if you’re looking for a night of wild sex with a psycho chick who’ll torch your car when things go south. If you’re looking for something a little more stable/less frightening, you’ve got to honestly pursue both her heart and her mind.
