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I want to introduce you to a revolutionary new way of dating, something that you’ve probably never been advised to do before (and yet is probably more successful than anything you’ve ever tried).
Most people, when dating, essentially use ‘seduction’ strategies.
These often amateurish – the person’s just made up what they think will work, trying their best to keep that performance going, and hoping that something will happen, e.g. being super nice or trying to impress them by being funny.
Or they might be ‘professional’ – people who have used Pick Up Artistry or other clever, well-tested strategies and techniques designed to manipulate and influence people into feeling attraction.
Regardless of whether you’re amateur or pro, or somewhere in-between on this spectrum, most people use some form of strategy that we’ll call ‘seduction’. I’m no different.
my history with seduction
For most of my life, in the early years, I used what you might call a very amateur strategy, which was to be very nice and very funny. I assumed that if I make people feel happy around me all the time, they will like me more, and therefore I will find a girlfriend or a partner that way.
When I finally realised that this approach doesn’t work – trust me, it definitely doesn’t – I switch 180 to the much more strategic way of doing it, the Pick Up Artist way. I learned how to push and pull, and be ‘cocky funny’, and use psychological techniques to essentially trick people into liking me, or at least liking what they thought I was.
Yes, all of this can succeed, if by ‘success’ you mean somebody is tricked into liking you. You can trick someone into liking you by being nicer than you actually are or being funnier than you feel like being. And you can also, of course, seduce people strategically with carefully placed words, body language techniques, scripts and patterns, and so on. These things do work, especially on insecure people.
What do you mean by saying “they work”?
Unfortunately, if your goal is to actually have a real connection with someone, these seduction strategies will backfire on you.
If you trick someone into liking you, you’re going to have to keep up that performance for them to keep liking you. If you suddenly reveal the real You later down the track, they’re going to be shocked and probably disappointed.
So what I want to talk about today is essentially a new way to seduce someone that requires zero strategy and does not have the intention of seducing them. And this is what the difference. Whether you’re amateur or pro with strategic seduction, you all have the same intention, which is to make the other person like you.
I’d like to introduce you now to something that has a different intention, but is actually equally if not more effective, and that is pushing them away with honesty.
What do confident people do?
What I noticed as I was developing myself is that truly confident people – the ones who have strong inner self-worth – don’t use any strategies. They never try to make people like them. You either like them or you don’t.
They polarize people with the mere force of their personality. They never try to make you like them, they will leave you to make that decision on your own. They just be themselves very boldly and shamelessly and you’re left to make a call.
Before I talk about what it is that they’re doing, I need to talk about why strategic seduction simply doesn’t work.
the problems with strategic seduction
When I said it doesn’t work, I don’t mean that it doesn’t make people attracted to you, although the success rate with that is pitifully low even with the professionals.
What I mean is that if what you’re looking for is a partner in life – if you’re looking for someone who’s going to love you for who you are, who will be with you through the highs and the lows – then strategic seduction is going backward rather than forward.
One of the things I noticed when I was doing the Pick Up Artist thing is that all my gurus, the guys that I looked Uup to and learned from and even paid for coaching, were all chronically single. Sure, they had a lot of women in their bed (or at least claimed to), but none of them seem to be able to maintain a long-term healthy committed relationship.
Even though some of them genuinely did want a relationship, they seemed incapable of maintaining one. Women would be very interested in them for short periods of time, but the interest would wane and they would lose their connection.
I couldn’t help but notice this and ask myself, “Why does that keep happening?”
So the problem with strategic seduction – whether you’re an amateur or pro – is that you’re setting an unhelpful precedent. You’re saying, “This is who I really am,” and now you have to live up to that. There was almost no human on the planet – other than pure psychopaths – who came maintain an act like that flawlessly without getting caught out.
You will also start to build up Imposter Syndrome. You know they only like you for the performance that you put on, and it starts to make you doubt that they would like the Real You. Eventually, you get to the point where you even believe that the real you must be hidden because it would put someone off.
Strategic seduction also has the problem of reciprocation. If you put on a performance, they’re not going to feel safe to be honest, so they will put on a performance in return. If you just watch people on a first date, you’ll see this performance going back and forth. It’s like these two actors acting out a scene while inside their minds the real version of themselves is just watching.
Essentially, there’s four people on the date. There’s the two that you can see – the ones talking to each other, laughing and sharing all the great stories. And then there are the two hidden people behind the scenes watching all this happen, desperately wishing that it will go well, and feeling forced to put on this performance.
These performances are not even that convincing, even when you’re professionally trained in seduction, unless you’re dealing with someone who has very low self-confidence. When you’re dealing with a confident or authentic person, they are going to see that something’s wrong. They’re going to see that you’re too cheerful, or that you never complain, or that you’re too funny and interesting to be a normal person.
They’re going to just notice this, and it’s going to check them a little bit. It’s going to put them on the back foot and raise their defenses because they realize, “Hey, I’m being played here.”
And putting on a performance sends a subtle message that de-values yourself. If someone can recognize that you’re putting on a performance, their brain is going to do a calculation and realize, “Hey, this person values my approval more than his own integrity. He’s putting on a performance to make me like him, rather than showing me who he truly is. So that shows me where his priorities are.”
There’s almost nothing more needy and unattractive than someone who would prefer that you like them than live with integrity.
Pushing people away with honesty
This is exactly what it sounds like. When you go into dating, rather than trying to seduce them into liking you, you try to get rid of them by being as vulnerably and boldly and shamelessly honest as you are capable of being.
What this does is polarize. It’s going to push a majority of people away because they won’t like the real you (or more likely they’re just going to be afraid of that kind of intimacy and honesty). But the people who stay are people that you will never have to perform for ever for the rest of your life.
If someone likes the raw, bold, honest you, you two will have an effortless connection from there on.
You want to make sure that people have no chance of feeling maybe about you. They’re either going to love you or hate (well, not love you and want to be away from you). You want to make sure that you’re going to put them in their position where they have to choose: either they’re all in on you, or they’re all out.
Most seduction strategies are about safety – trying to keep them interested without any risk of them falling out. When pushing away with honesty, you’re not only going to risk them falling out, you’re going to push them out.
The art of honesty
Being fully honest is an art more than a science, and I’ve got lots of resources that you can access (just contact me dan@brojo.org or check out the BROJO online courses).
What I will say now is that quite often people are scared to be honest because they’re worried that it will be creepy or argumentative or judgmental. But you’re mistaking what honesty really is. Honesty is just about expressing how you truly feel in the moment, your thoughts and your feelings as they arise. That’s all.
You don’t have to dig into your past and share your trauma. You don’t have to speak every little thing that comes into your head. You just have to identify what your truth is in any given moment and try your best to express it.
If the person listening likes it, they will stay in. If they don’t like it, they will move away. You won’t have to put any effort into making them like you, you’ll just let them decide for themselves based on the information that you’re providing.
Skeletons out of the closet
One example of how I did this was actually with my now wife. When we were first deciding whether or not to continue our relationship (which was going to be logistically difficult because it was long distance to begin with) we played a little game that I made up.
The game was very simple: each of us was to write a list of things that we thought would make the other person not like us anymore, and we had to share that list with each other before we decided to move forward. So I wrote a list of three to five things that I hadn’t told her yet that I thought would be a deal-breaker for her, and she did the same.
I can’t even remember what was on her list, that’s how unimportant that was to me! To her, the things on her list were a big deal, I just didn’t care about them. There were a couple of things on my life that caused her to stop and think, but in the end she decided to accept them.
And what this allowed us to do was to move forward knowing that we knew the worst about each other now, there’s really nothing more we have to worry about saying or doing in front of each other. We’ve already shared the darkest, most ugliest stuff we can think of.
This can be applied to dating as well. It doesn’t mean that when you meet someone, you say, “Hi, my dad never hugged me and I’ve got a leather fetish.” It just means that whenever a thought pops up in your mind or a feeling comes up very strongly for you throughout your interaction, you share it rather than masking it.
preferences and feelings
Pause. Take time to think before you react and try to get the truth out.
There two things in particular that you should be truthful about: your preferences (what you like and dislike), and how you feel about the other person. Other details and facts can be discovered later, but if you want a date to be really authentic, make sure that whatever topic comes up, you’re being honest with how you feel about it, and whenever you have feelings or thoughts about the other person, you share them with them, whether they’re positive or negative.
That kind of honesty is enough to ensure that you have a real connection with people that can last without you having to put in an effort.
For those of you still getting started with dating, I recommend taking BROJO’s initiating conversations with strangers course. That’ll teach you how to start interactions with honesty, so that you never have to break the performance later on. You can start with no performance and no strategy and you can grow from there really easily and effortlessly.
Thank you so much for watching/reading. I hope you found that valuable. Please share it around and subscribe to the YouTube channel if you want to get more content like this every week.
And of course, get in touch with me dan@brojo.org if you have any follow up questions or you want some more support, and I’ll see you all next time.