What is the art of pick-up? The art, for me, is in the meaningful encounter and the meaning to the encounter which the pick-up artist infuses through his art, meaning being so devoid from the everyday encounter which permeates and harrasses our day-to-day existence. And just as the meaning is in the encounter, the pick-up artist never dwells in the moment he has created, however fantastic it may be, but moves dutifully onto the next encounter, seeking the same meaning from nothing that he infused into the previous encounter, because his art lies in his finesse, and without his finesse his art is no more than the everyday.
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.
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.
