The importance of being relevant

In my post The natural art of communication I described this art as interaction with another human being at the level of meaning. One way of thinking about meaning is in terms of relevance. A meaningful communication is relevant both to its initiator and its recipient. For many guys starting out in pick-up, their fundamental problem is that they are just not relevant – in a sexual way – to the girls they interact with. What pick-up teaches a guy initially is how to say things which are relevant to a girl. Because these things are modelled from men who are attractive to women – which the beginner guy is not yet – they are relevant to the girl, but not relevant to the guy – in other words they are not truthful representations of who he is. The idea is that over time, the guy gradually aligns himself with the HB-relevant things he is saying until they are relevant (truthful) also to him – problem solved. For many guys starting out this is exactly their expectation: they learn attractive things to say to a girl and then through a feedback mechanism they just become attractive themselves.

So where’s the flaw? Why do I hear things like “Game will get you as many girls as you want, but it will never make you happy?” and why do I see smart, successful PUAs out of the blue erasing their entire archive of posts and denouncing pick-up as the work of Satan? I believe the error is in supposing that human interaction can be modelled as a finite set of possibilities. It’s an easy error to make – rather than actually learning to understand what a girl means, you instead learn a winning strategy – a sequence of moves that gets you from A to B in any circumstance. But there are no winning strategies for infinite possibilities, so the model is necessarily an approximation. That means you use a generic model to get a generic girl, and you end up having a generic relationship or generic one-night stand with her. The lingering unhappiness in some of the most prolific PUAs is that in denying the possibility of a girl’s uniqueness, they also deny their own uniqueness; their life ceases to have any relevance to them.

Before I close, I wanted to add a short coda on how this discussion relates to the cult of teacher in the pick-up community. The old proverb goes that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day but if you teach him how to fish you feed him for a lifetime. Guys who come into the pick-up community are like starving cats hungry for a fish; and there are plenty of teachers out there who’ll give them a fish, and then upon the release of their next product give them another fish, and so on. And the students will keep on coming back for more, because they’re hungry, and because it’s in the teacher’s interests to keep them hungry. But when he’s no longer able to feed them, or when another teacher somewhere else offers a tastier fish, they move on and in some cases renounce him, and rightly so because he’s been deceiving them. For me, the best teachers are the ones who teach you that they have nothing to teach you because you already know everything there is to know, and for that you might actually like them.

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