The two types of anxiety

Approach Anxiety (AA) is heavily covered in the Pick-Up literature, but less documented is the sister phenomenon of Escalation Anxiety. Escalation Anxiety is in play whenever a student complains of trouble “building sexual tension”, “getting attraction”, or even “running out of things to say”. Crudely speaking, all pick-up problems beyond the approach itself are a form of Escalation Anxiety, since the approach itself should be the first step in the escalation between a man and a woman towards s@x. With this model in mind, there should never be a question about what to do next in a pick-up.

I wanted to introduce in this piece what I feel is an interesting categorisation of pick-up styles based on these two types of anxiety. At the outset, anxiety in one of the two categories is disabling to the pick-up effort:

Approach & Escalation: AFC
Approach only: Sleazy guy
Escalation only: Gay best friend (GBF)

As a student becomes proficient in pick-up, often one of the two types of anxiety remains in the background although it is overcome sufficiently for the student to become successful with women. The legacy anxiety dictates his style:

Approach: Direct, typically 5-minute makeouts, same night lays (SNL)
Escalation: Indirect, favours social circle game, day 2s.

Obviously, most of us are something of a mixture of the two but it’s interesting to observe how one’s initial anxieties determine one’s eventual style.