Imagine that you are reading this article on the top floor of a high-end bookstore just a few blocks down from a prestigious law school. There is a lot natural light and the smells of cedar furniture and rain pleasantly tease your senses.
high quality women
As you glance out the window into the courtyard, you see a woman hurrying in the front door. Your jaw literally drops. She’s gorgeous.
You understandably decide that meeting her is far more important than reading my article and decisively rise to intercept her.
Having this sort of decisiveness is key if you are to even have a shot with a girl of this caliber.
And, though as of now you only suspect it, later you will learn that this woman is actually your dream girl.
She is mature, loving, and has no unmanageable hang-ups or neurosis. She also has easy access to an almost endless supply of high quality mates, her finances are taken care of, and she is popular and well-liked.
Yet, decisiveness alone is unlikely to win you this dame by itself. Even chutzpah will only get you so far.
Sure, by setting a sexy frame and being bold enough to ask for investment you may be able to become her lover, at least for a short period of time – but what if you want a more substantial relationship with her? What if you want to keep her around for more than the typical 3 months that a well-managed FWB lasts? What if you even want to keep her around for longer than even the typical 2 years of a long-term relationship?
What if you want to keep her around INDEFINITELY, without just counting on luck for that to happen?
If that is the case, then this article is for you.
The Difference Between Dating Up and Dating Down
Have you ever noticed that when you perceive a girl as “high value” you intrinsically act differently around her? You push yourself more; you are more active and engaged (ideally in a way that doesn’t appear try-hard, but instead in a way focused on your own skills, not the particular events or individual girls in your external reality); you view the relationship not as a therapeutic safe-haven from the world but more as a field of battle (in a good way, trust me!) or a challenging art project.
This is a major point of disconnect for a lot of guys. A huge portion of men have NEVER dated up, and have only ever dated down.
If you haven’t yet dated a woman who is more or less like this, you have probably not yet, to use a poker analogy, made a big bet on a girl. After all, you’ve never had to. The kinds of girls in the lower value fields of dating will put up with a fair bit of laziness and weakness on their man’s part, because they have few other options and are used to this kind of behavior. However, a high quality woman with options like the one in our narrative is not just going to wait around for you to step it up.
With high quality girls, the ante is upped, and you have to invest a bit more (in yourself and to a degree in the interaction itself) from the get-go just to play the game at all.
high quality women
So you see, the problem isn’t that she’s a bitch or high maintenance, as some guys think, but that you simply don’t offer enough value.
Guys who don’t offer much value typically come in two flavors:
Vanilla: The Nice Guy
The main reason most guys haven’t dated a girl like this is because they’ve never had that large of a pot to play with to begin with (i.e., relatively low value, too attainable, don’t know how to get her investing or even intrigued to begin with), so it may feel like they have to go “all in” to win her favor, which usually makes them come off desperate (because they are).
The “nice guy” is a guy who is rather mediocre and complacent. He is a common man, and his primary value is in his ability to follow orders and not make waves. It sounds harsh when I say it, but if you think about the conventional values our present systems of education tends to instill in people, you may find that what I claim is uncomfortably accurate.
Let’s look at how this man approaches his dream girl in that bookstore from earlier:
high quality women
He skips downstairs and, as casually as he can, glances around the atrium. There she is, her skirt hugging her hips as she stands in line at the coffee cart.
Wow. Just… wow…
Without deciding to, he walks over and stands in line two people back. He tries not to look at her too much as he gets his coffee, but he just can’t help glancing over at her every few seconds. Luckily, it’s taking a moment for the coffee to get made, so everyone has to stand around waiting for their orders to come out.
This is his chance. As he’s waiting for his coffee, he positions himself so he is fairly close to her, and then he turns and speaks. His voice is quiet, as though he wants to avoid alerting everyone else around that he is indeed making a move:
“Hi, I like your hair. I’m Gary.”
She acts like she doesn’t hear him and checks her phone. He stands there, not exactly sure what to do. After a moment she moves away back towards the coffee stand and starts talking to the barista. She gets her coffee then quickly bounces off, away through the atrium, never to be seen again.
Chocolate: The Jerk
The feeling I mentioned earlier of wanting to go “all in” is actually one of the biggest snags of dating high quality girls. It is the result of scarcity. And while the nice guy remains largely oblivious of his low value and represses knowledge of his scarcity, occasionally some guys will become aware of this fact. The most common reaction you see when he does realize this is he adopts the personality of the jerk. He thinks the problem was that he was too nice, so he takes it in completely the other direction.
Unfortunately, however, by doing so this man unwittingly traps himself in yet a new flavor of the same low value paradigm, albeit, one with more opportunities to grow (if he has the wit to allow himself to be open to learning new things, that is).
What’s happened is that our nice guy over-compensates his low value with an “I don’t care” attitude to protect his ego and try and hide how little he really has to offer beyond his mediocre life (more from himself than from other people).
By being a jerk, he tries to appear more interesting and valuable (i.e., powerful) – but it’s rarely all that convincing, and it’s mostly just a reaction against his overly “nice guy” past. More often than not he just comes off as an unappreciative, aggressive know-it-all.
Yet being a jerk isn’t all bad. For one thing, the jerk may guilt himself into self-improvement. The dissonance between his low value social role and his image of himself as a high value man may spur him into taking more effective action.
This mentality may also help him get laid if he isn’t already getting any, and it may help him neutralize his social anxiety too – but be aware: usually when someone is in this mindset they end up only attracting low quality/inexperienced girls.
And even if the jerk does manage to hook a girl of higher value than himself, his self-image as a jerk usually blocks him from accepting and learning from her higher value, and he’ll choose to become a grudging, bitter critic instead – overly-domineering and unkind – to protect his ego
Usually his relationships only last as long as the people he surrounds himself with have low self-esteem (only people with low self-esteem or who want something from this person will usually hang around with him for longer than they have to).
This then leads to a growing bitterness towards everyone, especially women, which is an attitude that reinforces itself as he racks up more experience.
So this is not usually the happiest guy in town.
And if he stays in the jerk phase for too long, he starts thinking of women as unreliable, manipulative, and bitchy, which of course, just turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as women (and most men for that matter) are mirrors, and they will in large part behave how you expect them to.
Even more, the girls he gets hung-up on are usually not all that spectacular to begin with. But because they make him so frustrated, they get him over-investing, and, to preserve his image of himself as a high value man, he ends up subconsciously categorizing these low to mid value women as high value. And thus every girl who isn’t an ogre who will date him is rationalized into being higher value, no matter how plain or unpleasant she really is.
Now let’s see how the asshole approaches the girl in our bookstore narrative.
Unlike the nice guy, this personality comes in loud and strong:
Guy: “Love the skirt. Remember how popular those were three years ago?”
Girl: “Haha, what?”
Guy: “Nah, it’s totally okay. It actually looks fairly decent on you. I’m Chaz.”
Girl: “Okay!”
Guy: “But really, tell me your name.”
Girl: “Sorry, I have to go!”
This approach might work on a lower value or inexperienced girl, but the high value girl has almost certainly seen it before, and she’s seen through it. She may be more interested than she was in the nice guy (at least she’s aware of you and recognizes that you aren’t a push-over!), but it’s rare that this sort of approach leads to intimacy (if it works it usually means there aren’t that many high quality men around and she’s willing to settle because she’s horny), and even rarer that it leads to something more than a one-night stand.
You see, what both the nice guy and the asshole fundamentally fail to realize is that the problem never was about being nice or not – it was about RESPECT. Most importantly, self-respect. This is because how you treat others is a reflection of how you perceive yourself. So if you’re a dick to other people, it implies that you’re a dick to yourself. And people pick up on this subconsciously. Even more, it’s just bad manners and try-hard; it comes off as an attempt to qualify yourself to other people. Your efforts to appear powerful are doomed at their conception; they undermine themselves.
Sometimes though, you have to persist in your folly to the extreme before you can remedy it.
This is all just to say that developing self-respect is necessary for learning a good work ethic, which is necessary for advanced skill-building, which is necessary for achieving absolute abundance and transcending the jerk/push-over dialectic.
Note: As an aside, you can have a personality that is a mix of these two, i.e., a chocolate-vanilla swirl, of sorts. However, this personality tends to unfortunately still be in a low to mid-range value paradigm (high effort, minimal returns).
Get Bitter, or Get Better
So we’ve identified some mindsets that only help maintain a value imbalance and in the end just get in the way of the man who actually wants to raise his value and become the kind of man that a high quality girl would want to date.
And yes, even though values (or at least the knowledge of values, to tip my hat to that champion of objective values, Max Scheler) are subjective, people can still be considered more or less valuable based on their relationships with one another through the roles they play, the services they provide, the exclusivity/rarity of those services, etc.
So, how do we know when there’s a value imbalance between ourselves and someone else?
As Chase explains in his article ‘Social Value and Value Imbalances’:
“A value imbalance is easy enough to detect: just ask yourself "Do I really want to spend time with this person?"”
And if you conclude that you REALLY want to spend a lot of time with someone, yet they don’t seem to have a reciprocated interest in you, you may have just identified a value imbalance wherein you are the less valued party.
So, once you become aware that there is a value imbalance between you and the type of girls you want to be dating, how do you deal with it?
Some guys get bitter…
Others get better.
It’s up to you what kind of man you choose to be.
In other words, to continue our poker analogy, the first way is to complain about the rules of the game, that the cards were shuffled wrong, and that that guy over there’s counting cards. The second way is to master the game, build up your pile of chips, and walk away having played the game… and won.
It’s your choice.
The Rules of Engagement
You can also, of course, choose to play the game wholeheartedly and still lose. In my opinion, this is still far more admirable than the man who is too afraid to play at all.
Which brings us to the second half of this article, in which we will discuss how to give yourself the best chance you can get in regards to long term dating.
Assuming you chose the second option (“get better”), the rest of this article will provide you with some basic rules of engagement for attracting and keeping high quality women around (by keeping them satisfied) indefinitely.
The first 3 are things you can do by yourself, while the last 3 require you to be in an active relationship to practice.
#1: Lay Out Your Standards
What is a high quality girl, anyway? I’ve been talking about the concept of “high quality” a fair bit now, but I haven’t defined it very clearly as of yet. This was intentional; the reason for this is because you must define “high quality” for yourself.
It is the source of your particular standards, after all; the kinds of things you tolerate and the kinds of things you consider praiseworthy.
If you don’t know what you want, you won’t have any way to measure the quality of any given girl besides the vague standards your society has given you. So your first task is to make a list of the attributes you value in a woman who you’d want to keep around in an intimate role for an indefinite length of time. Basically: describe your ideal woman.
The more specific you get, the better (and the more you draw from your own experience, the better. This is what you want, not what Chase or I want). But to help you get your thoughts flowing, here are a few qualities I personally look for in my partner for long-term relationships:
Self-aware
Self-sustained financially (sexual relationships and business should not mix – especially long term sexual relationships, as, when you share funds, you turn your relationship into a small business. Unless you are comfortably rich, this will cause mutual scrounging. If you're scrounging, scrounge on your own! You probably aren't yet the kind of man this woman should be with right now. Remember, she has a much shorter social value curve than you; she will most likely depreciate in value in the sexual marketplace much sooner than you will. See this article to know why that is)
Sexy
Shares some key interests with me, in particular conversationally and physically
Sharp intellect
Sincere (note that I didn't say honest, though a good dose of honesty goes a long way too)
Smells good
Socially flexible
Socially aware
Somewhat reasonable
Strong (personality-wise more than physically, but physically too)
Surprising (girls who are entirely predictable are no fun)
Symmetrical, healthy body
Conversely, you can’t just go parading around with solely outward-facing values. It would be a treacherous lack indeed. You’d have high expectations for others but low ones for yourself.
So do this exercise, but also turn it in towards yourself. You may have the highest of standards for other people, but if your core standards don’t also apply to yourself, you’re going to cause quite a lot of dissonance and disappointment all around.
Bonus to Having Clear Values
A side-benefit of knowing what you value and what your standards are comes in in the realm of giving compliments.
When you give a girl a compliment, if you draw from your list of things you honestly value in women, your attitude when you give it will be genuine and also one of someone who is screening for certain qualities, both of which combine to make some pretty powerful compliments.
When you do this though, make sure the compliment corresponds to an attribute you notice of them and also that the situations warrants it. Don’t go calling a girl “socially aware” unless she’s making some astute observations.
Sometimes breaking down people’s strengths for them like this is enough to get them chasing by itself.
There’s another reason why it’s important to get as detailed as you can here. The more specific you get, the clearer your knowledge of what you value, and the more ready you will be in identifying those attributes in other people. Who knows, you may even find some diamonds in the rough.
#2: Fundamentally, It’s About You
This is the most important rule I’m going to give you today. You must consider the possibility that you are a totally selfish being; that you don't have a good thing to be said for you whatsoever; that you are a complete and utter rascal.
And you need to take this as deep as you can. For, when you deeply investigate the nature of selfishness, you discover something rather peculiar.
What happens is this:
You say “I love myself and I seek my own advantage.”
But then you start to wonder what you mean by self. What is this self that I love?
This becomes an ever-deepening conundrum, until suddenly you realize something very odd: you are only aware of yourself in terms of other. The things you really like are exclusively things other than yourself, while whatever you think “you” are remains wholly unknown, and seemingly unknowable.
So you discover a reciprocity; a total interdependence between what you call “self” and what you call “other”; between your organism and your environment. And from there, like modern ecologists and physicists have had to do, you expand your scope of awareness to include unified fields of behavior, instead of only considering individual, separate organisms/aspects.
high quality women
In other words, when you are perfectly selfish you discover that the self you love really is the universe. Obviously you don’t like all of it, you are selective (perception is selection, after all), but on the whole, you love yourself in terms of what is other.
With this kind of fantastic honesty, you will be able to penetrate your motivations to their depths.
To use a video game analogy to draw this point in closer towards our topic at hand, you must realize and accept that you are Player 1. This is your show, and it’s your choice how you interpret and evaluate what is happening. It is your choice how you live. It is your choice how you die. The degree to which you understand this is the degree to which you have free will
So when you let a girl into your life, it is your choice what role she plays. In this way, you let her come along for the journey – but it is YOUR journey – she is just one character in the overall drama of your life.
So be selfish (though I suggest that you don’t do it half-assed, as that seems to be more trouble than it’s worth).
#3: Know What She Wants
The higher the quality of women you’re meeting, the more rigorously they’re screening guys out. Guys who are lazy, unfocused, aimless, overly pleasure-seeking, etc. are screened out like it’s no one’s business.
This isn’t because these girls are mean, but because, like all people, to quote Chase from his article ‘The Long Term Relationship’, high quality women are…
“…searching for men they can relate to – men who are as ambitious and successful and driven as they are. You don’t have to have your act perfectly together – I’m by no means financially well off, with an uncertain future, and no promising job prospects at the moment, on any continent – but I’m dating a beautiful, confident girl with a porn-star body, a conservative upbringing, a highly prestigious professional job, who is in the process of getting her MBA, and she buys me food and brings me gifts nearly every time I see her. Despite my shaky situation though, she sees that I’m an intelligent guy who’s got drive and ambition and wants to do something with his future – whatever that might be – and I treat her well and make her feel things no other man ever has.
She wants an ambitious, graceful, man. A strong connection, a man who is desired by others, who’s caring, has class, and is sexy. Who makes her feel things she’s never felt before.”
Become that man, and the likelihood that your girl bounces after the 2 year drop reduces dramatically (though you still need novelty, passion, and challenges in your relationship to keep her emotionally engaged – and also potentially children, if you’re open to that option). But to succeed you must know what she wants in the first place.
How do you find this out?
One of the most powerful ways I know of is to elicit her values and then present yourself in a way that embodies them. You can read about how to do that here.
#4: Finding High Quality Girls
Now that you’ve taken on a few kingly ways of thinking, it’s time to go find your queen. First, here are some articles we’ve already written about where to find girls:
Finding Your Niche
Top 10 Places to Meet Girls
Where to Find an Amazing Woman: 20 Surprising Places
Some more specific things to keep in mind:
Integrate picking up as much as you can into your daily routine and maximize your exposure to the kinds of women you want to meet. If this is something you do in the context of your overall life, you’ll become the kind of seducer you want to be more quickly, and you’ll reach a deeper skill level too. Regular cold approach is the key to your development. So find girls on the train to work, go to a café to read a book and pick-up on the way there, meet girls while at the cafe, and then continue doing so on your way to wherever you’re going next.
Go for walks. Don’t be afraid to wander. I was talking with Hector about this the other day; I may have to write a whole article in praise of wandering sometime, as it really is an underappreciated activity which is unreasonably laden with guilt for most people. For now, just start thinking about them as a way to roll the die for a wide range of unpredictable opportunities.
Give girls the benefit of the doubt more often than not. Be kind. Reject smoothly. Screen fast.
Experiment with new ways of living. This will naturally expose you to a lot of women. I rarely go out to meet girls anymore. My lifestyle is just diverse enough that I catch them while I’m transitioning or at some minor-event or another.
Meet somewhere with abundance built in.
Use your imagination and be ambitious.
Don’t be afraid to crash a party. I’ve met amazing girls at high end social functions I wasn’t invited to and I’ve crashed a bachelorette party that turned into quite the debauch. The bride got especially involved… but that’s beside the point ;)
MOVE FAST
#5: Let Her Join Your Party
When you’ve hooked a girl, it is of tantamount importance that you present her the opportunity to join your party. Once again, think of this in terms of video games – namely, RPGs. You wander around the world and meet other people, and every once in a while you meet someone you like. If you want them to join your party, you should give them the chance to prove themselves to you. Give them a task to do, like bringing a loaf of bread to your house on a date, or give them the opportunity to open up to you by deep diving them.
high quality women
This is also a point about trust. When someone is in your party, or in consideration to join it, you need to give them the potential to become closer to you and earn your trust. If you don’t do this, they won’t feel as special; they won’t feel like you’re discerning and appreciating them for their unique value if you are as open to strangers, or even more so, than you are to them.
This is also the value of nicknames, as well as monogamy. It just makes her feel special; like she is part of your distinguished inner circle. And everyone wants to feel special. One way of looking at it is through the lens of security. If someone demonstrates that they value you, you feel it is less likely they will replace you without just cause, and this makes you feel safe and increases your sense of belonging and trust in them.
Of course, you have to be able to trust before you can grant people ways to earn your trust. But more on that another time.
#6: Set Clear Expectations
Relationships are like clay pots. Early on they are easy to mold and shape, but after a while they dry and become rigid. And at that point they are much more difficult to change.
So how do you set good expectations early on?
Simple. You can use conscious framing, but really, most of your early expectation setting will come naturally once you have clarified what you value and what your standards are for yourself. You will, for example:
expect a girl to not use you as a shoulder to cry on
expect her to want to ravish you (assume attraction)
expect her to be open-minded and try new things with you
expect her to hold you to high standards, and not tolerate you acting weak or getting stuck in a rut
You do this not because you’re making a conscious effort to do so, but because you’ve already instilled these expectations in yourself through your values.
Yet, I want to re-emphasize here that you do need to experiment and get some experience before you’re going to be able to clearly know what you value in the first place. So going out and becoming intimate with a wide variety of women and field testing different ways of presenting yourself is extremely useful in this regard.
Meeting Your Dream Girl
If after this article this kind of girl just seems like too much effort for you and you’d prefer to just stick to dating party girls or some other sweet, yet not so ambitious dames, that’s great! The beauty of values is that we all like different things and weigh them differently in importance. For me finding a woman who is clever might be at the top of my list, while for you clever is lower down and instead you rate compassion as more important.
This is a very good thing. If we all wanted the same things (luckily I don’t think this’ll ever happen) the rat race would be justified and universally accepted, and the world would be a much less interesting place.
However, for those of you who have decided that going for highly ambitious, elite women is the way to go, I hope I have successfully conveyed to you the importance of becoming a highly ambitious, elite man to do so. I also hope that I’ve given you a few ideas as to how to become one.
Of course, women are not the only reason to empower yourself. There are many other reasons: a powerful man is more respected, more likely to go on interesting adventures, and more likely to achieve great things, just to name a few. Yet, there is certainly no shame and indeed much worth in using our desire for having amazing women in our life as a tool to establish within ourselves the work ethic of a king.
Oh, and if you were wondering how the high value man picks up his dream girl, it’s really quite the same as he does any other girl (at least externally):
Guy:: “Howdy – how’s it going?”
Girl: “Good!”
Guy: “You look really distracted.”
Girl: “Yeah, I’m late for my lecture.”
Guy: “You’re a student?”
Girl: “I’m a professor, actually.”
Guy: “Oh, that’s cool – I love intelligent women. Are you single?”
Girl: “Haha, that’s rather forward of you! Well, yes, I am.”
Guy: “Nice – here, I see you’re in a hurry, so put your number in my phone and we can get together sometime!”
Girl: [puts number in phone] “My name’s Albena, by the way. Albena Ellstrom.”
Guy: “Oh, you’re Bulgarian.”
Girl: “I’m surprised you knew that! What’s your name?”
Guy: “We can talk about why I know that when we meet up. My name’s Mark. But you really shouldn’t be late for your lecture!”
Girl: “Yes, you’re right. See you, Mark!”
In this article we went pretty deep. So, to recap, here are the main points we discussed:
There is a fundamental difference in attitude between when you are dating down and when you are dating up. If you have game, it will outwardly look similar, but your attitude with high quality girls will be more active and engaged.
The nice guy and the jerk both maintain a low value paradigm because they lack self-respect and are prone to over-invest/over-qualify themselves in/to others – especially women.
It’s your choice how you handle your low social value (if you have it and are aware that you have it). You can get upset about it, or you can establish a work ethic that will raise your value.
We then talked about a few basic rules of engagement for dating any girl, especially high quality girls:
Lay out clear standards for yourself and your ideal partner
Investigate and accept your selfishness
Find out what your girl values and elicit those values
Maximize your exposure to the types of girls you want to meet
Give her ways to become closer to you, feel special, build trust, and express her affection
Set clear expectations early on
I could go on and on about this topic, as the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than what I’ve covered today. But, for the sake of length, I’ve chosen just a few of the more important aspects you need to have handled if you are to date high quality girls and keep them around.
At the beginning of this article I promised that I’d show you how to keep a high quality girl around (and satisfied) indefinitely. There are no short cuts to doing so, and there are no guarantees that any given approach will work.
The only way to do so is to BECOME the kind of man who it is worth sticking around for for your particular girl, and then consistently communicating and reminding her of this fact by means of the framework I’ve provided above. There are other elements – tactics like letting on that you have other options and occasionally getting in a fight with her, but this article is long enough as it is, so you can just read up on those here and here instead.
Remember, it’s not really about getting any particular girl, but about using your passion for women to become the kind of man that you know you can be; about using your passion to transform yourself into a king.
Regards,
Ethan Fierre
high quality women
As you glance out the window into the courtyard, you see a woman hurrying in the front door. Your jaw literally drops. She’s gorgeous.
You understandably decide that meeting her is far more important than reading my article and decisively rise to intercept her.
Having this sort of decisiveness is key if you are to even have a shot with a girl of this caliber.
And, though as of now you only suspect it, later you will learn that this woman is actually your dream girl.
She is mature, loving, and has no unmanageable hang-ups or neurosis. She also has easy access to an almost endless supply of high quality mates, her finances are taken care of, and she is popular and well-liked.
Yet, decisiveness alone is unlikely to win you this dame by itself. Even chutzpah will only get you so far.
Sure, by setting a sexy frame and being bold enough to ask for investment you may be able to become her lover, at least for a short period of time – but what if you want a more substantial relationship with her? What if you want to keep her around for more than the typical 3 months that a well-managed FWB lasts? What if you even want to keep her around for longer than even the typical 2 years of a long-term relationship?
What if you want to keep her around INDEFINITELY, without just counting on luck for that to happen?
If that is the case, then this article is for you.
The Difference Between Dating Up and Dating Down
Have you ever noticed that when you perceive a girl as “high value” you intrinsically act differently around her? You push yourself more; you are more active and engaged (ideally in a way that doesn’t appear try-hard, but instead in a way focused on your own skills, not the particular events or individual girls in your external reality); you view the relationship not as a therapeutic safe-haven from the world but more as a field of battle (in a good way, trust me!) or a challenging art project.
This is a major point of disconnect for a lot of guys. A huge portion of men have NEVER dated up, and have only ever dated down.
If you haven’t yet dated a woman who is more or less like this, you have probably not yet, to use a poker analogy, made a big bet on a girl. After all, you’ve never had to. The kinds of girls in the lower value fields of dating will put up with a fair bit of laziness and weakness on their man’s part, because they have few other options and are used to this kind of behavior. However, a high quality woman with options like the one in our narrative is not just going to wait around for you to step it up.
With high quality girls, the ante is upped, and you have to invest a bit more (in yourself and to a degree in the interaction itself) from the get-go just to play the game at all.
high quality women
So you see, the problem isn’t that she’s a bitch or high maintenance, as some guys think, but that you simply don’t offer enough value.
Guys who don’t offer much value typically come in two flavors:
Vanilla: The Nice Guy
The main reason most guys haven’t dated a girl like this is because they’ve never had that large of a pot to play with to begin with (i.e., relatively low value, too attainable, don’t know how to get her investing or even intrigued to begin with), so it may feel like they have to go “all in” to win her favor, which usually makes them come off desperate (because they are).
The “nice guy” is a guy who is rather mediocre and complacent. He is a common man, and his primary value is in his ability to follow orders and not make waves. It sounds harsh when I say it, but if you think about the conventional values our present systems of education tends to instill in people, you may find that what I claim is uncomfortably accurate.
Let’s look at how this man approaches his dream girl in that bookstore from earlier:
high quality women
He skips downstairs and, as casually as he can, glances around the atrium. There she is, her skirt hugging her hips as she stands in line at the coffee cart.
Wow. Just… wow…
Without deciding to, he walks over and stands in line two people back. He tries not to look at her too much as he gets his coffee, but he just can’t help glancing over at her every few seconds. Luckily, it’s taking a moment for the coffee to get made, so everyone has to stand around waiting for their orders to come out.
This is his chance. As he’s waiting for his coffee, he positions himself so he is fairly close to her, and then he turns and speaks. His voice is quiet, as though he wants to avoid alerting everyone else around that he is indeed making a move:
“Hi, I like your hair. I’m Gary.”
She acts like she doesn’t hear him and checks her phone. He stands there, not exactly sure what to do. After a moment she moves away back towards the coffee stand and starts talking to the barista. She gets her coffee then quickly bounces off, away through the atrium, never to be seen again.
Chocolate: The Jerk
The feeling I mentioned earlier of wanting to go “all in” is actually one of the biggest snags of dating high quality girls. It is the result of scarcity. And while the nice guy remains largely oblivious of his low value and represses knowledge of his scarcity, occasionally some guys will become aware of this fact. The most common reaction you see when he does realize this is he adopts the personality of the jerk. He thinks the problem was that he was too nice, so he takes it in completely the other direction.
Unfortunately, however, by doing so this man unwittingly traps himself in yet a new flavor of the same low value paradigm, albeit, one with more opportunities to grow (if he has the wit to allow himself to be open to learning new things, that is).
What’s happened is that our nice guy over-compensates his low value with an “I don’t care” attitude to protect his ego and try and hide how little he really has to offer beyond his mediocre life (more from himself than from other people).
By being a jerk, he tries to appear more interesting and valuable (i.e., powerful) – but it’s rarely all that convincing, and it’s mostly just a reaction against his overly “nice guy” past. More often than not he just comes off as an unappreciative, aggressive know-it-all.
Yet being a jerk isn’t all bad. For one thing, the jerk may guilt himself into self-improvement. The dissonance between his low value social role and his image of himself as a high value man may spur him into taking more effective action.
This mentality may also help him get laid if he isn’t already getting any, and it may help him neutralize his social anxiety too – but be aware: usually when someone is in this mindset they end up only attracting low quality/inexperienced girls.
And even if the jerk does manage to hook a girl of higher value than himself, his self-image as a jerk usually blocks him from accepting and learning from her higher value, and he’ll choose to become a grudging, bitter critic instead – overly-domineering and unkind – to protect his ego
Usually his relationships only last as long as the people he surrounds himself with have low self-esteem (only people with low self-esteem or who want something from this person will usually hang around with him for longer than they have to).
This then leads to a growing bitterness towards everyone, especially women, which is an attitude that reinforces itself as he racks up more experience.
So this is not usually the happiest guy in town.
And if he stays in the jerk phase for too long, he starts thinking of women as unreliable, manipulative, and bitchy, which of course, just turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, as women (and most men for that matter) are mirrors, and they will in large part behave how you expect them to.
Even more, the girls he gets hung-up on are usually not all that spectacular to begin with. But because they make him so frustrated, they get him over-investing, and, to preserve his image of himself as a high value man, he ends up subconsciously categorizing these low to mid value women as high value. And thus every girl who isn’t an ogre who will date him is rationalized into being higher value, no matter how plain or unpleasant she really is.
Now let’s see how the asshole approaches the girl in our bookstore narrative.
Unlike the nice guy, this personality comes in loud and strong:
Guy: “Love the skirt. Remember how popular those were three years ago?”
Girl: “Haha, what?”
Guy: “Nah, it’s totally okay. It actually looks fairly decent on you. I’m Chaz.”
Girl: “Okay!”
Guy: “But really, tell me your name.”
Girl: “Sorry, I have to go!”
This approach might work on a lower value or inexperienced girl, but the high value girl has almost certainly seen it before, and she’s seen through it. She may be more interested than she was in the nice guy (at least she’s aware of you and recognizes that you aren’t a push-over!), but it’s rare that this sort of approach leads to intimacy (if it works it usually means there aren’t that many high quality men around and she’s willing to settle because she’s horny), and even rarer that it leads to something more than a one-night stand.
You see, what both the nice guy and the asshole fundamentally fail to realize is that the problem never was about being nice or not – it was about RESPECT. Most importantly, self-respect. This is because how you treat others is a reflection of how you perceive yourself. So if you’re a dick to other people, it implies that you’re a dick to yourself. And people pick up on this subconsciously. Even more, it’s just bad manners and try-hard; it comes off as an attempt to qualify yourself to other people. Your efforts to appear powerful are doomed at their conception; they undermine themselves.
Sometimes though, you have to persist in your folly to the extreme before you can remedy it.
This is all just to say that developing self-respect is necessary for learning a good work ethic, which is necessary for advanced skill-building, which is necessary for achieving absolute abundance and transcending the jerk/push-over dialectic.
Note: As an aside, you can have a personality that is a mix of these two, i.e., a chocolate-vanilla swirl, of sorts. However, this personality tends to unfortunately still be in a low to mid-range value paradigm (high effort, minimal returns).
Get Bitter, or Get Better
So we’ve identified some mindsets that only help maintain a value imbalance and in the end just get in the way of the man who actually wants to raise his value and become the kind of man that a high quality girl would want to date.
And yes, even though values (or at least the knowledge of values, to tip my hat to that champion of objective values, Max Scheler) are subjective, people can still be considered more or less valuable based on their relationships with one another through the roles they play, the services they provide, the exclusivity/rarity of those services, etc.
So, how do we know when there’s a value imbalance between ourselves and someone else?
As Chase explains in his article ‘Social Value and Value Imbalances’:
“A value imbalance is easy enough to detect: just ask yourself "Do I really want to spend time with this person?"”
And if you conclude that you REALLY want to spend a lot of time with someone, yet they don’t seem to have a reciprocated interest in you, you may have just identified a value imbalance wherein you are the less valued party.
So, once you become aware that there is a value imbalance between you and the type of girls you want to be dating, how do you deal with it?
Some guys get bitter…
Others get better.
It’s up to you what kind of man you choose to be.
In other words, to continue our poker analogy, the first way is to complain about the rules of the game, that the cards were shuffled wrong, and that that guy over there’s counting cards. The second way is to master the game, build up your pile of chips, and walk away having played the game… and won.
It’s your choice.
The Rules of Engagement
You can also, of course, choose to play the game wholeheartedly and still lose. In my opinion, this is still far more admirable than the man who is too afraid to play at all.
Which brings us to the second half of this article, in which we will discuss how to give yourself the best chance you can get in regards to long term dating.
Assuming you chose the second option (“get better”), the rest of this article will provide you with some basic rules of engagement for attracting and keeping high quality women around (by keeping them satisfied) indefinitely.
The first 3 are things you can do by yourself, while the last 3 require you to be in an active relationship to practice.
#1: Lay Out Your Standards
What is a high quality girl, anyway? I’ve been talking about the concept of “high quality” a fair bit now, but I haven’t defined it very clearly as of yet. This was intentional; the reason for this is because you must define “high quality” for yourself.
It is the source of your particular standards, after all; the kinds of things you tolerate and the kinds of things you consider praiseworthy.
If you don’t know what you want, you won’t have any way to measure the quality of any given girl besides the vague standards your society has given you. So your first task is to make a list of the attributes you value in a woman who you’d want to keep around in an intimate role for an indefinite length of time. Basically: describe your ideal woman.
The more specific you get, the better (and the more you draw from your own experience, the better. This is what you want, not what Chase or I want). But to help you get your thoughts flowing, here are a few qualities I personally look for in my partner for long-term relationships:
Self-aware
Self-sustained financially (sexual relationships and business should not mix – especially long term sexual relationships, as, when you share funds, you turn your relationship into a small business. Unless you are comfortably rich, this will cause mutual scrounging. If you're scrounging, scrounge on your own! You probably aren't yet the kind of man this woman should be with right now. Remember, she has a much shorter social value curve than you; she will most likely depreciate in value in the sexual marketplace much sooner than you will. See this article to know why that is)
Sexy
Shares some key interests with me, in particular conversationally and physically
Sharp intellect
Sincere (note that I didn't say honest, though a good dose of honesty goes a long way too)
Smells good
Socially flexible
Socially aware
Somewhat reasonable
Strong (personality-wise more than physically, but physically too)
Surprising (girls who are entirely predictable are no fun)
Symmetrical, healthy body
Conversely, you can’t just go parading around with solely outward-facing values. It would be a treacherous lack indeed. You’d have high expectations for others but low ones for yourself.
So do this exercise, but also turn it in towards yourself. You may have the highest of standards for other people, but if your core standards don’t also apply to yourself, you’re going to cause quite a lot of dissonance and disappointment all around.
Bonus to Having Clear Values
A side-benefit of knowing what you value and what your standards are comes in in the realm of giving compliments.
When you give a girl a compliment, if you draw from your list of things you honestly value in women, your attitude when you give it will be genuine and also one of someone who is screening for certain qualities, both of which combine to make some pretty powerful compliments.
When you do this though, make sure the compliment corresponds to an attribute you notice of them and also that the situations warrants it. Don’t go calling a girl “socially aware” unless she’s making some astute observations.
Sometimes breaking down people’s strengths for them like this is enough to get them chasing by itself.
There’s another reason why it’s important to get as detailed as you can here. The more specific you get, the clearer your knowledge of what you value, and the more ready you will be in identifying those attributes in other people. Who knows, you may even find some diamonds in the rough.
#2: Fundamentally, It’s About You
This is the most important rule I’m going to give you today. You must consider the possibility that you are a totally selfish being; that you don't have a good thing to be said for you whatsoever; that you are a complete and utter rascal.
And you need to take this as deep as you can. For, when you deeply investigate the nature of selfishness, you discover something rather peculiar.
What happens is this:
You say “I love myself and I seek my own advantage.”
But then you start to wonder what you mean by self. What is this self that I love?
This becomes an ever-deepening conundrum, until suddenly you realize something very odd: you are only aware of yourself in terms of other. The things you really like are exclusively things other than yourself, while whatever you think “you” are remains wholly unknown, and seemingly unknowable.
So you discover a reciprocity; a total interdependence between what you call “self” and what you call “other”; between your organism and your environment. And from there, like modern ecologists and physicists have had to do, you expand your scope of awareness to include unified fields of behavior, instead of only considering individual, separate organisms/aspects.
high quality women
In other words, when you are perfectly selfish you discover that the self you love really is the universe. Obviously you don’t like all of it, you are selective (perception is selection, after all), but on the whole, you love yourself in terms of what is other.
With this kind of fantastic honesty, you will be able to penetrate your motivations to their depths.
To use a video game analogy to draw this point in closer towards our topic at hand, you must realize and accept that you are Player 1. This is your show, and it’s your choice how you interpret and evaluate what is happening. It is your choice how you live. It is your choice how you die. The degree to which you understand this is the degree to which you have free will
So when you let a girl into your life, it is your choice what role she plays. In this way, you let her come along for the journey – but it is YOUR journey – she is just one character in the overall drama of your life.
So be selfish (though I suggest that you don’t do it half-assed, as that seems to be more trouble than it’s worth).
#3: Know What She Wants
The higher the quality of women you’re meeting, the more rigorously they’re screening guys out. Guys who are lazy, unfocused, aimless, overly pleasure-seeking, etc. are screened out like it’s no one’s business.
This isn’t because these girls are mean, but because, like all people, to quote Chase from his article ‘The Long Term Relationship’, high quality women are…
“…searching for men they can relate to – men who are as ambitious and successful and driven as they are. You don’t have to have your act perfectly together – I’m by no means financially well off, with an uncertain future, and no promising job prospects at the moment, on any continent – but I’m dating a beautiful, confident girl with a porn-star body, a conservative upbringing, a highly prestigious professional job, who is in the process of getting her MBA, and she buys me food and brings me gifts nearly every time I see her. Despite my shaky situation though, she sees that I’m an intelligent guy who’s got drive and ambition and wants to do something with his future – whatever that might be – and I treat her well and make her feel things no other man ever has.
She wants an ambitious, graceful, man. A strong connection, a man who is desired by others, who’s caring, has class, and is sexy. Who makes her feel things she’s never felt before.”
Become that man, and the likelihood that your girl bounces after the 2 year drop reduces dramatically (though you still need novelty, passion, and challenges in your relationship to keep her emotionally engaged – and also potentially children, if you’re open to that option). But to succeed you must know what she wants in the first place.
How do you find this out?
One of the most powerful ways I know of is to elicit her values and then present yourself in a way that embodies them. You can read about how to do that here.
#4: Finding High Quality Girls
Now that you’ve taken on a few kingly ways of thinking, it’s time to go find your queen. First, here are some articles we’ve already written about where to find girls:
Finding Your Niche
Top 10 Places to Meet Girls
Where to Find an Amazing Woman: 20 Surprising Places
Some more specific things to keep in mind:
Integrate picking up as much as you can into your daily routine and maximize your exposure to the kinds of women you want to meet. If this is something you do in the context of your overall life, you’ll become the kind of seducer you want to be more quickly, and you’ll reach a deeper skill level too. Regular cold approach is the key to your development. So find girls on the train to work, go to a café to read a book and pick-up on the way there, meet girls while at the cafe, and then continue doing so on your way to wherever you’re going next.
Go for walks. Don’t be afraid to wander. I was talking with Hector about this the other day; I may have to write a whole article in praise of wandering sometime, as it really is an underappreciated activity which is unreasonably laden with guilt for most people. For now, just start thinking about them as a way to roll the die for a wide range of unpredictable opportunities.
Give girls the benefit of the doubt more often than not. Be kind. Reject smoothly. Screen fast.
Experiment with new ways of living. This will naturally expose you to a lot of women. I rarely go out to meet girls anymore. My lifestyle is just diverse enough that I catch them while I’m transitioning or at some minor-event or another.
Meet somewhere with abundance built in.
Use your imagination and be ambitious.
Don’t be afraid to crash a party. I’ve met amazing girls at high end social functions I wasn’t invited to and I’ve crashed a bachelorette party that turned into quite the debauch. The bride got especially involved… but that’s beside the point ;)
MOVE FAST
#5: Let Her Join Your Party
When you’ve hooked a girl, it is of tantamount importance that you present her the opportunity to join your party. Once again, think of this in terms of video games – namely, RPGs. You wander around the world and meet other people, and every once in a while you meet someone you like. If you want them to join your party, you should give them the chance to prove themselves to you. Give them a task to do, like bringing a loaf of bread to your house on a date, or give them the opportunity to open up to you by deep diving them.
high quality women
This is also a point about trust. When someone is in your party, or in consideration to join it, you need to give them the potential to become closer to you and earn your trust. If you don’t do this, they won’t feel as special; they won’t feel like you’re discerning and appreciating them for their unique value if you are as open to strangers, or even more so, than you are to them.
This is also the value of nicknames, as well as monogamy. It just makes her feel special; like she is part of your distinguished inner circle. And everyone wants to feel special. One way of looking at it is through the lens of security. If someone demonstrates that they value you, you feel it is less likely they will replace you without just cause, and this makes you feel safe and increases your sense of belonging and trust in them.
Of course, you have to be able to trust before you can grant people ways to earn your trust. But more on that another time.
#6: Set Clear Expectations
Relationships are like clay pots. Early on they are easy to mold and shape, but after a while they dry and become rigid. And at that point they are much more difficult to change.
So how do you set good expectations early on?
Simple. You can use conscious framing, but really, most of your early expectation setting will come naturally once you have clarified what you value and what your standards are for yourself. You will, for example:
expect a girl to not use you as a shoulder to cry on
expect her to want to ravish you (assume attraction)
expect her to be open-minded and try new things with you
expect her to hold you to high standards, and not tolerate you acting weak or getting stuck in a rut
You do this not because you’re making a conscious effort to do so, but because you’ve already instilled these expectations in yourself through your values.
Yet, I want to re-emphasize here that you do need to experiment and get some experience before you’re going to be able to clearly know what you value in the first place. So going out and becoming intimate with a wide variety of women and field testing different ways of presenting yourself is extremely useful in this regard.
Meeting Your Dream Girl
If after this article this kind of girl just seems like too much effort for you and you’d prefer to just stick to dating party girls or some other sweet, yet not so ambitious dames, that’s great! The beauty of values is that we all like different things and weigh them differently in importance. For me finding a woman who is clever might be at the top of my list, while for you clever is lower down and instead you rate compassion as more important.
This is a very good thing. If we all wanted the same things (luckily I don’t think this’ll ever happen) the rat race would be justified and universally accepted, and the world would be a much less interesting place.
However, for those of you who have decided that going for highly ambitious, elite women is the way to go, I hope I have successfully conveyed to you the importance of becoming a highly ambitious, elite man to do so. I also hope that I’ve given you a few ideas as to how to become one.
Of course, women are not the only reason to empower yourself. There are many other reasons: a powerful man is more respected, more likely to go on interesting adventures, and more likely to achieve great things, just to name a few. Yet, there is certainly no shame and indeed much worth in using our desire for having amazing women in our life as a tool to establish within ourselves the work ethic of a king.
Oh, and if you were wondering how the high value man picks up his dream girl, it’s really quite the same as he does any other girl (at least externally):
Guy:: “Howdy – how’s it going?”
Girl: “Good!”
Guy: “You look really distracted.”
Girl: “Yeah, I’m late for my lecture.”
Guy: “You’re a student?”
Girl: “I’m a professor, actually.”
Guy: “Oh, that’s cool – I love intelligent women. Are you single?”
Girl: “Haha, that’s rather forward of you! Well, yes, I am.”
Guy: “Nice – here, I see you’re in a hurry, so put your number in my phone and we can get together sometime!”
Girl: [puts number in phone] “My name’s Albena, by the way. Albena Ellstrom.”
Guy: “Oh, you’re Bulgarian.”
Girl: “I’m surprised you knew that! What’s your name?”
Guy: “We can talk about why I know that when we meet up. My name’s Mark. But you really shouldn’t be late for your lecture!”
Girl: “Yes, you’re right. See you, Mark!”
In this article we went pretty deep. So, to recap, here are the main points we discussed:
There is a fundamental difference in attitude between when you are dating down and when you are dating up. If you have game, it will outwardly look similar, but your attitude with high quality girls will be more active and engaged.
The nice guy and the jerk both maintain a low value paradigm because they lack self-respect and are prone to over-invest/over-qualify themselves in/to others – especially women.
It’s your choice how you handle your low social value (if you have it and are aware that you have it). You can get upset about it, or you can establish a work ethic that will raise your value.
We then talked about a few basic rules of engagement for dating any girl, especially high quality girls:
Lay out clear standards for yourself and your ideal partner
Investigate and accept your selfishness
Find out what your girl values and elicit those values
Maximize your exposure to the types of girls you want to meet
Give her ways to become closer to you, feel special, build trust, and express her affection
Set clear expectations early on
I could go on and on about this topic, as the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than what I’ve covered today. But, for the sake of length, I’ve chosen just a few of the more important aspects you need to have handled if you are to date high quality girls and keep them around.
At the beginning of this article I promised that I’d show you how to keep a high quality girl around (and satisfied) indefinitely. There are no short cuts to doing so, and there are no guarantees that any given approach will work.
The only way to do so is to BECOME the kind of man who it is worth sticking around for for your particular girl, and then consistently communicating and reminding her of this fact by means of the framework I’ve provided above. There are other elements – tactics like letting on that you have other options and occasionally getting in a fight with her, but this article is long enough as it is, so you can just read up on those here and here instead.
Remember, it’s not really about getting any particular girl, but about using your passion for women to become the kind of man that you know you can be; about using your passion to transform yourself into a king.
Regards,
Ethan Fierre
