How I use conversations about her “peak experiences” in dates, and in pitching non-monogamy

Women want you to “get” them, to lead them effectively, and not to be boring: remember that boredom = death when it comes to dating. What’s that look like? It means not being too boring and conventional, but it also means avoiding being too weird and out there.

On dates, I often ask girls about their peak experiences, and a reader I’ve emailed with has mentioned that he “needs to remember your peak experiences line for my next date.” It’s a favorite, and I’ve used many variants on it, and it’s also great because the girls will usually offer a socially acceptable answer at first, like, “When I graduated from college.” whatever. Then I can talk about how most people won’t admit their true answers, and say something like, “You know when it’s Sunday and someone asks what you did this weekend and you were like, ‘I was hanging out,’ because you can’t say, ‘I spent all weekend in bed with this awesome guy.'” A comment like that does a bunch of work… if you think you understand, explain what work you think it does in the comments.

There are socially acceptable things to say, and we often default to them, but I’m interested in the true answers, although they may be a little taboo. Most people won’t violate social norms much, unless another person does so, a little bit, first. There are also categories of “peak experience”; “Holding my niece for the first time” is a peak life experience, but not in the same category as “Having group sex in a hotel with hot women I really like, when we all trust each other and aren’t holding back.” Or, “When I’m riding my bike through the city on a warm night, experiencing the city like it’s a part of me and I’m a part of it.”

When the girl asks me mine (girls are predictable, often to the point of boredom), I often tell her it’s a little intense, or I tell her a minor one, like the first time I kissed a high school crush, something like that… it goes into questions of what makes peak experiences, and when she last had one. A lot of girls haven’t had peak experiences recently, and then I can do a Forer statement where I say that she’s doing a lot of work, school, and social media, and they’re okay on a daily basis, but that she yearns for something more intense. A lot of girls will be like, “OMG, how did you know that?” I’ll say that she feels like she’s in a bit of a rut, and that she’s maybe hoping someone will help her break out of it, by not being like other people.

The conversation can move towards hopes and dreams for the future. It can talk about what she’s done so far. It can talk about the need for physical action in a world where people are staring into screens all the time. Most girls know spending so much time staring mindlessly at their phones is dumb, but they also lack the discipline to stop. If the conversation is done right, you’ll ideally learn a lot about the girl. Because you, the man, are opening it up, you already have some pretty good stories and ideas in there. You’re creating a bubble in which you and the girl are going to have peak experiences, and everyone else is going to be stuck glumly going to work. You’re a man of action. The best lines begin a conversation whose pace and rhythm you already know.

This conversation also led, later, into sex clubs, that’s part of the pitch, to talk about how many peak experiences are sexual. And there’s a ton more from there. In my previous life, I’d also introduce the girl to my friends who do these things, so that she has some social context for it (this is depicted in THE GOOD GIRL).

I think the “peak experiences” bit arrests girls’ attention because they’re used to boring conversations: work, school, where are you from. Conversations that take 2% of your brain and attention to have. I want conversations to feel limitless, along with possibilities. If you follow the conversational grooves, and you never challenge the girl or say something unusual, she’ll be bored. Most girls are bored with their lives most of the time. Are you going to be another boring guy who just wants to get her into bed? Or are you going to challenge her a bit, by subtly and indirectly implying she’s a bit of an automaton who needs to get out of the automaton path?

I often like breaking the fourth conversational wall… if we’re at a party, I’ll ask if she really wants to be at this party, and what her ideal party entails, “besides hot and fascinating men, of course, which is every woman’s ideal party.” Most conversations are predictable, and so you want to be unpredictable, in the right way. If you are unpredictable by saying you’re really into Jefffrey Dahmer, and has she ever been to a serial killer museum?, then that is not good-unpredictable. Then you’re the story she tells her friends about the psycho she met yesterday. Good-unpredictable is maybe one “level” more intimate than is called for by the situation. It’s curiosity, but not intrusion. It’s breaking the rules a little bit, in the right ways. Based on what girls have told me, the right kind of breaking and bending conversational rules, or social rules more generally, is too rare. If you’re too bound by convention and rules, you’re another boring guy. If you’re not bound enough, you’re weird or scary. The goal is to be intriguing, which means knowing when to plough forward and when to back up. In other words, it’s inside her OODA loop. Most guys let girls inside their OODA loop, and thus are perpetually off balance. As you’ve learned from jiu-jitsu, balance is key, and he who loses it, often loses.

“Peak experience” talk can lead to sex talk. Sex clubs and non-monogamy are often peak experiences. I think part of the reason I’ve been able to do such things well is that I’m pretty good at floating the idea (“‘adult parties’ are way more fun than regular parties” … “I have friends who are into having a great time in ways that other people can’t always handle…”) and pretty good at figuring out where the girl might be, and going forward or back based on that… and then I’m also pretty good at giving the girl some social context, so that helps too. I see guys online being like, “I can’t find any girls who will do non-monogamy with me” and it’s like… they might be unlucky, or they might also be bad at figuring out how to pitch. When I’m out with a woman, I’m listening to her, watching her, studying her, and making subtle calibrations to what I’m doing. I’m calibrating, but without looking like a beta p***y. It’s possible to both calibrate to the girl and not be that most disgusting of things, a male “feminist”.

Is she talking about music festivals and parties? She probably loves to f**k and needs to get f**ked sooner, not later. Is she shier, retient, a little reluctant to talk about sex, and emphasizes how close she is to her family? Maybe a little less. Maybe she needs more safety and comfort. Maybe she’ll really like seeing me with some of my friends.

The goal is for me to “get it.” When I kiss her, does she pull back? How does she pull back? Is she super cold, or is she flirty? When I kiss her neck, does she respond, or is that not her favorite thing? And on and on. This happens not only with women, but with couples, around non-monogamy.

Obviously, when I’m dating a woman, I can’t cover everything, and can’t know everything, but often with women, or with many things in life, it’s two steps forward, one back, guess, test, check, loop. Where is she, where am I? Where’s the OODA loop.

Most girls, if a guy they barely know, or even one they’re casually sleeping with, is like, “Let’s go have group sex,” out of nowhere, they’re going to say no. If a guy walks up to a strange girl and says, “Will you sleep with right now?”, she’s going to say “no,” even if she thinks he’s hot. He needs some social finesse. Pitching group sex needs social finesse properly too. If it’s pitched properly, starting with my favorite intros around “what are your peak life experiences?”, a lot of girls will say yes, eventually, to trying. They need a guy who isn’t going to judge them, who is going to encourage them, who knows what he’s doing, who has social framing, and so forth. She needs to be seduced first.

Girls love to be teased. But what does “teasing” mean? It’s close to flirting, and it’s not explicit. It’s implicit. Take an analogy: normal people don’t like reading textbooks. They want incomplete information, and things they can infer, but that aren’t stated directly. Classic male nerds are like textbooks: smart, complete, but also kind of boring to most girls. Seducers are like TV shows or novels, letting the viewer or reading figure things out.

Girls love “Maybe.” They love “it just happened.” If a guy gets this, and lets her vacillate in her “maybe” while advancing her sex and other aspects of a relationship, she loves it. If the guy doesn’t get this, and tries to be too explicit with her, she’ll have to say “no.” She doesn’t like saying “no.” She likes guys who can enjoy the tension between a man and a woman, without breaking from the tension, and without getting overly eager to get to the p***y. The male engineering mindset is the antithesis of “maybe,” which is why so many men have problems: they want a binary world of 0 and 1, while women live in the analogue world that resists being quantized.

Chances are good that, when she comes on a date, she doesn’t know what she wants. She wants magic and chemistry to happen, but doesn’t know how to make that happen. Learning to be a player is synthetically practicing the steps to make the girl feel magic and chemistry. I elaborate these themes in Women hate the demystification of romance: commodities, artisans, and the game: men can learn the female system, ranging from desires to dreams to habits to practices to dates, and then turn a mystical, artisanal process of accident and happenstance into an industrial process with more predictable inputs nad outputs. Women aren’t pig iron, so it’s not like you load them into a conveyor belt on one side, apply the Linz–Donawitz process, and wind up with steel on the other. But there are a sufficient number of regularities for men to learn how to be players, just as men can learn how to be actors, salesmen, etc. As a guy, you look for the regularities, and then systematize. Sometimes the system demands non-systematic elements, however, much as traditional computer programming can’t produce what’s happening through less deterministic AI or ML.

The “peak experiences” path is a way to get deeper inside her mind. There are other paths, but that one is a favorite of mine.

The girl is in the land of “maybe,” while the guy lets her stay there, while also having logistics covered, places picked out, and ideas about how to move the girl forward. He practices, she doesn’t. Young hot chicks are always scarce. Want more access to them? You better learn to try.