The "No Game" Approach To Meeting Women

Many young, college age men have pondered the question of how to successfully meet and impress the women they desire and have come to a similar conclusion: You need to have "Game".

This statement implies that you need some strategy, some angle, some unique, calculated approach if you hope to be successful in convincing a beautiful woman to go on a date with you. "You can't just be yourself", many would say, "You have to have Game!" This approach prescribes behaving almost entirely different around women than you normally would, always having a slick line and impressive story on hand in the event that conversation should arise.

I find a different approach to be far healthier and more effective in tackling the same question. I call it, "The No Game Approach".

First, calling it "No Game" is confusing, because when people say someone has "no game" they usually mean the person is awkward and tends to freeze up around women. A new title for the approach would be needed to avoid such confusion. When I say you should have "No Game", I mean that you should remain true to your own identity when meeting women. Do not attempt to use convoluted angles that your buddies swear will work. Be yourself, use your style of interpersonal interaction, use your humor, etc.

Second, it is a much longer, more involved approach and thus, requires you to have actual interest in a woman beyond just a passing sexual urge. Someone "running game" might be able to get a woman at a bar or club to go home with him after a night of praising her beauty and grossly exaggerating his own status in life. In contrast, someone without game gets a woman by meeting her in a workplace, school or some other neutral environment, and slowly builds a foundation of genuine friendship. Through a succession of conversation and multiple exchanges, he builds upon this friendship until one day, perhaps weeks or even months later, a romance is built on the foundation of this friendship.

The problem that many men find in the "No Game" approach is that it requires of them the courage to be completely comfortable in being themselves. Increased use of wit aside, attempting to get the girl of your desire without game demands that you are genuine and honest in your formation of a friendship and any possible relationship with her. Over-embellishing achievements, lying about your past, greatly over stating the money you make, or altering your expression of personality in any significant way means that you are playing a game with her. This is difficult for many men, as they assume that they need to be especially smooth when meeting women. Many men are insecure, believing that their true self is too "boring" or "average" to impress a woman. This style of thinking often leads men to formulate all sorts of crazy "angles" for impressing women. They often alter clothing, behavior, humor, facts about their life, occupation, social and economic status, language, and a whole lot more, all with the intent of appearing more attractive and desirable to the opposite sex.

Sociobiology has a lot to say about this matter. Due in part to unbalanced parental involvement, women realize that if they get pregnant, they are the ones that are pregnant. The man has no biological obligation to be involved in the child's life. The woman is the one who must bear the child for nine months, birth the child, and care for the child for a great number of years. Women can successfully do all of this with no male involvement, however since the desire to ensure that your genes get passed into the next generation exists subconsciously in all of us, the survival and reproduction of her children is of utmost importance. Since the dawn of man, women have learned that it would be much easier if they had a man to help them in this great task.

Imagine women far back in the history of our species living on the plains or in the jungles of Africa. There was no day-care, no school she could drop the kids off at before going to work. She had to constantly be with her children. There existed two serious problems if the man involved in child raising was weak or disappeared. How will she hunt and gather food with two children to look after? How will she defend them against predators that are stronger than she is? Certainly the presence of a strong man to go out and hunt for food while she took care of her young, or to defend against attacks on his family, would increase the chance of her young's good health and survival.

This is where sociobiology steps in and gives us the "Marketplace Theory of Attraction." Women are said to inherit criteria for a male partner that bears some control over whom they are attracted to. In general, women tend prefer a man who is physically fit and has a substantial amount of resources to provide for her and her children. We see examples of this everywhere, specifically in the media. TV shows such as Sex and The City feature the main female characters discussing what they find attractive in men, and a common theme is money and power. Over the eons of time, men have likely picked up on the tendency of women to be generally attracted to these traits and thus have consistently tried to emulate what they believe a woman is looking for.

All of this begs the question: If sociobiology is correct in stating that women are naturally attracted to physical fitness, money and power because of inherited mating criteria, what is a man to do about? To this I reply: Absolutely nothing. It is important to understand that, while sociobiology may explain general trends of women tending toward common themes in men, there is much more that goes into successful courtship. Human attraction is a deeply involved process, involving many seemingly unknown mental processes. Although sociobiology can offer an explanation of the woman who marries the rich businessman even though she does not particularly like him, it has trouble explaining the woman who falls deeply in love with a very poor artist living in a studio apartment. The point is that most people have something unique to offer, something about them that will attract a suitable partner. Much of human attraction remains unexplained, and the subtle nuances of your unique personality will likely be what your eventual partner finds most attractive about you. Attempting to come off as someone you believe to be more attractive to women, but who is contrary to your actual identity, will only lead to disappointment and confusion.

Such behavior is doomed in concept as well as in practice. It is essential to realize that no serious relationship can ever be maintained this way. Even if you could maintain the facade over the long term (which, unless you possess sociopathic traits, you will not be able to,) why would you want to do this? Such a relationship would require constant work, always acting a role and pretending to be someone you are not. Projected into the future, this type of relationship will rob you of true intimacy and leave you feeling empty and alone, even with your girl by your side.

Any relationship built on "game" is destined to fail because it stands on little more than false perceptions of the other person that will eventually be shown for what they are. Any man who is serious about trying to meet women must understand this fact: There is no "Game" when it comes to meeting women. Women want expect the real you, just as you expect the real them. It is far better to be liked for who you really are than who you pretend to be. The day that you gain the courage to express your true self will be a day of great realization to you.

2008...

As we approach the halfway point of 2008, I feel the need explain what a topsy-turvy roller-coaster this year has been for me.

For the first time in three years I am a single man. I don't always know how to feel about it because on one hand, the relationship I was in was not satisfying and the both of us were unhappy, so it is good in a sense that we are not in it anymore. However I am left with the lingering feeling of "If three years of hard-fought love couldn't make it, what will?"

I do know that this experience has not made me a total commitment-phobic. If anything, I find that I am actually more closely in tune to my own feelings now than I have been in a long time! While I am certainly not wanting to jump into another commitment right away, I am confident that when the time is right, I will know it.

Other than that, the summer has just begun and so far it has been exactly what I had hoped for! The Shape has played two summer concerts in the last two weeks and we have many more scheduled all summer long. Outside of that I have basically just been relaxing and having lots of fun with a select few of my closest friends. We have made a lot of plans for the next few months of summer and my only wish is that we actually follow through with them all. If we do, I'll end up having one of the coolest summers of my life, and maybe even accomplish a small goal of mine that I have been working on lately.

I do my best to be an optimist these days, although it's much easier said than done. I guess I am still a realist before anything else, but I will not deny a strong creative side of me that does contain fantasies and dreams that, in all likelihood, aren't going to play out the way I envision them in my head. Ultimately though, these last few months to me have been, and continue to be, a time of self discovery. I am learning a lot about myself and my friends, and have begun looking at life through an entirely different lense than ever before. More specifically, I have been easing off the constant pressure I used to place on myself to always be productive and always be striving forward and all those habits that still linger from the business days, and I have begun to try just being myself and letting go. I have begun focusing more on the power of love and open mindedness, creativity and passion, and how they all fit into my life. I have studied the roles of everyone I call a friend, and what their specific role in my life is as well as what my role in their life is.

I am nowhere near complete. Still very much a work in progress and I openly acknowledge all my flaws and I am working to accept the ones I cannot change and fix the ones I can. This blog will cease to be used strictly for psychology talk and will now take the form of a personal blog that will also feature psychology talk when I wish to talk about it.

Cheers to the start of a hopefully amazing summer!

Plants Have Feelings Too!

Yes, you read that heading correctly! Apparently plants are a lot smarter than we thought. A new study conducted by a student at the University in Hamilton in Canada shows that plants can sense family members growing near them and actually share natural resources instead of competing with them. The following article detailing the study and it's findings appeared in Science magazine on June 13th 2007. I found this study so incredibly interesting I was compelled to share it. Enjoy!

Rooting for the Home Team

By Krista Zala
ScienceNOW Daily News
13 June 2007

Humans tend to treat relatives better than strangers--"blood is thicker than water," as the axiom goes--and now it appears that plants play by the same rules. A new study provides the first evidence that flora can recognize its family and that plants treat kin better than outsiders.

Plants sense their neighbors and respond competitively: Some grow more leaves, some grow additional flowers, and some bloom earlier--all in a jostle to create more offspring. Still, undergraduate student Amanda File at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, wondered whether plants might be more easygoing if the plant next door is related.

She and McMaster plant evolutionary ecologist Susan Dudley looked at Great Lakes sea rocket (Cakile edentula var. lacustris), an annual plant that self-fertilizes to produce a batch of nearly identical siblings. They stuffed pots with four plants each--all either related or unrelated--so that their roots touched. They then grew the plants for 8 weeks, until the sea rocket started to flower, and then uprooted them to see how fully the roots, stems, leaves, and buds had developed. Plants potted next to their own ilk allocated less of their mass to root development than did those dwelling among strangers, the researchers report online this week in Biology Letters.

This study is the first to show that plants distinguish between relatives and strangers, Dudley says, and that plants can respond altruistically by growing a smaller root system when they sense family nearby. In a community where siblings share so many genes, "their success is your success," Dudley explains. "If they can agree to be nice to each other, then everybody does better."

The mechanism the sea rocket uses to discriminate remains unknown. And the behavior is "not altruism so much as reduced antagonism," says evolutionary geneticist John Kelly of the University of Kansas, Lawrence. Ray Callaway, a plant community ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula, adds that the polite familial relations may sour if the soil conditions worsen and it's every plant for itself. Furthermore, says Hans de Kroon, a plant ecologist at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, the study is not long-term enough to tell whether there's a net benefit to cooperation.

Dudley agrees and is looking into field studies to see whether cooperation boosts overall fitness. But everyone seems to concur that such kin recognition and generous response to family members wrecks the assumption that individual plants always exploit their resources to the fullest possible extent.