“He’s not paying enough attention to me”

I run into a chick I know peripherally, mostly through a friend: she’s a high 6, about 30, not bad but a little outside my ideal hotness window, and we talk about our mutual friend and how he’s moved, though he gave her all of his mushrooms. I ask how that’s going and she tells me she’d taken what she meant to be a microdose, but it was apparently more, and had an emotional experience last weekend. Does she want to say more about that? Not too much, but she says she cried because the guy she’s been seeing “isn’t paying enough attention to me.”

Did I smirk, laugh, or nod sagely? Not sure, can’t recall, but the narcissistic flashed me back to Attention is the only tool modern men have. Her guy sounds like he’s handling her well, making her fanny flutter, cause she’s thinking of him, and not yet bored with him.

Cause I’m a dog at heart I got her number, uselessly, but, like I say, fire & manuever, baby. Next time I run into her I’m going to ask if she’s found a man to pay her enough attention yet.

Texting guide

Disclaimer: I’m not a texting expert and came of age in the age of the “phone call,” a now-dead part of courtship.

But every guy has to text today. I’ve thought about texting in the context of this chick, and a comment from “Factory” in this post, “You refer to ‘less is more’ with long game.. How long between pings is recommended here?”, made me write, because it’s a short question but a detailed answer.

My impression is that most guys do texting poorly. This is based primarily on listening to chicks and having chicks read me texts from guys or showing me their phones (with 100 notifications). The funniest ones are when I’ve been banging a chick while she racks up texts and Snapchats from orbiters, then reads them to me. I often suggest that I reply with a dick pic. They laugh.

(I’ve only actually sent one or two.)

I don’t have exact rules for texting because every situation is different. Internally, I let the questions, “Are we arranging to meet up? Will this lead us closer to meeting up?” guide me. If the answer is no, I don’t contact or contact at a minimum. For example, with the twenty-year-old, I knew we couldn’t meet on Saturday or Sunday, so I said nothing on those days. For all I know, she was getting gang banged by a pile of randoms, but I couldn’t prevent it by occupying her space. Texting her more would not prevent bad outcomes and likely would decrease her attraction to me. On Monday, I re-initiated contact due to logistics. When I learned mid-day Monday about more delay, I stopped texting and said nothing from about noon onward.

Tom Torero has a principle that he naturally names after himself, called the recovery text. If text #1 gets no reaction, wait some time, like 48 – 72 hours, then send a follow-up of some kind (he likes silly exaggerations or memes). If she still doesn’t reply, move on. Some chicks will just lose track of texts. I have had the same thing happen, especially when I have lots of chicks in the air, being juggled. Most guys have never had more sex on offer than they can handle, which is a chick’s default world. So the follow-up text is fine. I have seen guys say things like, “If she doesn’t reply right away, delete her number.” That is probably overkill. ButI want to move towards meeting… and if it isn’t moving towards meeting… I move on.

Any kind of contact is reinforcement. Attention is crack to chicks, and attention is the only tool modern men have. It’s a scarce resource that most men blindly fling away. Don’t do that. Don’t communicate to her, “You’ll get attention from me regardless of the amount of sex we’re having.”

Texting timing is itself pretty variable. Another question should be, “Is this advancing me towards sex?” If the answer is “No,” then don’t do it. What you don’t do often matters as much as what you do. Same with diet. I’ve been ranting about sugar forever, because in diet what you don’t eat is almost as important as what you do eat (vegetables, nuts, eggs, olive oil).

My principle is that a guy should stay somewhat mysterious. Answers should be playful and indirect most of the time. Chicks get bored easily and like a challenge (this is another texting guide). The paradox, however, is that the guy typically has to exert much more energy in the beginning of the seduction. The “beginning” may last a long time. And it’s usually good to ping something related to the conversation or the chick. Every text shouldn’t just be, “Meet me on Monday or Wednesday at 7 pm.” Too little whimsy. Some kind of callback to the conversation or context of the girl helps too.

I am NOT the best texter, that much is clear. Some of the writers on Nash and Riv’s blogs have said, when making plans with a chick, offer her two nights, with one day between each. So you’d offer her Monday at 7 or Wednesday at 7, as per my example above. That seems like a good idea to me, but I’ve typically done one night, one place, one time, under the theory that I’m “leading the chick.”

I like the two nights, though. I’ve been in the game for a while and I’m still learning.

If you have a kid, you’ll probably learn to frame choices that don’t matter. You can’t negotiate with a little kid. So instead of saying, “put your shoes on,” you say, “do you want to wear the blue socks or the red socks?” The kid will pick between those. Same principle here, with the two-night option, I suspect.

It’s a little thing, but it’s stuck with me. When you go back through the archives of the better, more analytical players, you’ll see that material. As you can also tell from this post, I am not the BEST player, but I’ve done enough to learned some things. I honestly think the average guy can improve more just by avoiding common errors than by anything else.

Attention is the only tool modern men have

“Attention is the only tool modern men have,” like all Red Quest posts, are now on Substack.

“Let’s say a girl is acting bitchy,” is a good post.

“When having a boundary crossed actually means you’ll walk out, and you have zero tolerance for bullshit, it will show up as soon as the micro transgressions happen. This permeates the whole thing since your very first moment.”

The only real tool modern men have at their disposal is attention. You either give attention or withdraw it. That’s really it, and the rest is commentary, except maybe for deciding when, where, why, and how to give or withdraw attention. When a guy blows up some girl’s phone, he’s dissipating one of the only (or the only) tool(s) he has. Where and how he directs his attention is the fundamental of modern game…and I have many thoughts about modern game.

A wonderful book by David Barash, Out of Eden: The Surprising Consequences of Polygamy, lists all the tools men used to have to enforce monogamy. They could kill their wife’s lover… seriously, that used to be legal in many parts of the United States… “Until the 1970s, it was entirely legal in several states for a husband to kill his wife’s lover if he caught them in flagrante.” Today, if your wife takes a lover and has his kid and then divorces you, she still gets your money and child support. Men had physical force. They had the weight of society enforcing monogamy, and, back then, women would be ashamed for breaking up their marriage. “Historically, in many cultures, the murder of an adulterous wife and/or her lover has not only been condoned but encouraged.”

Abandoned women used to face big consequences, unlike today, when most women leave the moment they think they can get a better guy, and then are rewarded with cash and prizes by the Orwellianly named “family court” system. Once upon a time, “The bottom line: male lethality is unquestionably real, especially in the context of sexual competition, and even more when the competition is immediate and involves direct access to a man’s sexual ‘rights’ and ‘property,’ which is to say, women.”

Personally I prefer the system we have now, which doesn’t entail nearly as much death or non-consensual, but the system today also tells people monogamy doesn’t work and it’s great to f**k around.

It is pretty much a cross cultural universal that men intimidate their spouses to refrain from extramarital sex, punishing them—often severely and not uncommonly, lethally—should they do so.

That’s Professor Barash too. Obviously that’s not true today (and nor am I advocating that it be true), but imagine what a society devoted to working towards monogamy would look like. Until you have read evolutionary biology, you likely don’t understand the game. You might think you know, but you’re still acting on superstition and chance.

In the contemporary world, men don’t have violence or social censure as an option… we have nothing but attention itself. When you give a woman attention, you reinforce whatever behavior she is offering. When you withdraw attention, you convey your displeasure with that behavior.

This is also why I think most men should not use most social media, or minimize use, cause social media gives women attention and validation that is unlikely to lead to sex. A woman loves attention almost as much as a man loves sex; giving too much to her is an easy way to kill her attraction to you. Whatever is scarce is valuable. Offer too much attention and you will demonstrate that your attention is low value. High-value men are too busy building companies, making art, seducing women, and having peak experiences to offer attention, especially lame digital attention, to women who do not reciprocate their attention appropriately. High-value men are also not spending a lot of time on social media because they are in the real world, doing things, making things, building things, and having sex. If a woman is responsive online but doesn’t want to meet in person, then you’re not moving towards sex and can let her go.

It’s not impossible to use social media well, but it’s never or pretty much never a good idea to “like” women’s photos and statutes. Yet I see guys do this all the time. As more people exist primarily in the fake digital space, guys who can drive interactions in the real world will become more and more valuable.

When a woman crosses a boundary, withdraw attention. Better yet, give attention to other, better behaved women. Guys with options are very different than guys without. Girls know you have options when you shut the fuck up.

“Shutting the fuck up.” No one talks about this in today’s verbal diarrhea culture, but because no one talks about it or does it, it’s valuable.

Chicks also know you’re high value when you stop giving them attention and start directing your attention in the only places you should: your skills, your life, the women who are having actual sex with you.

Excessive texting is a waste of attention. Texting should be focused on your next meeting. You are a busy man, as I wrote above. Focus your attention on making real-life things happen. You can do a little bit of texting, that’s fine, but always be focused on making texting an unimportant adjunct to your real life. Today, this will also set you apart from other guys. Less is more, in most circumstances.

Social media is another form of attention, and most guys misuse it. Social media is an attractive nuisance. It’s attractive, because guys imagine that, if they can just get a good enough Instagram feed, hot chicks will message them for hookups. For the vast majority of guys, this will never happen. The vast majority of guys are better off learning cold approach pickup, improving themselves, improving their delivery, etc. But social media is easy and can be done without leaving the apartment. For inexperienced guys, social media takes the perceived sting out of real-world rejection. So the temptation is to take the way that seems easy (social media) but leads nowhere, instead of the way that at first seems hard (cold approach pickup, developing an attractive life) that leads somewhere.

Overall, lots of women screw around, but they’re much more secretive about it than men are. “DNA fingerprinting has recently revealed that among many species, including Homo Sapiens, females are more inclined to sexual variety than had previously been thought: that is, to polyandry.” If she’s inclined that way, you need to be ready for it.

Jealousy exists because it’s useful, “If women weren’t polyandrous—selected to engage, on occasion, in sexual relationships with more than one male—then men wouldn’t be disposed to violent mate guarding in the first place.” Today, we’ve got to be diligent about not wasting our scarce attention resources on chicks who haven’t earned them. Most guys tragically lack game and thus abundance, and their lack shows.