"Hey honey, can I pee in your butt?”
I stood there horrified as my friend shouted this at literally every attractive girl who came within five feet of us.
The year was 2006. I was in college, and at the time, to help myself get better with girls, I started hanging out with a couple guys who got more women than anyone else I knew. I was young and naive and needy and still saw relationships in terms of performance. The idea, then, was that I'd go out with these super player guys, study what they said to women and then emulate it to be successful myself.
Enter my friend Matt and can I pee in your butt?
Matt was a guy I briefly met once through a friend, but his reputation was widely known. He was in a rock band, had tattoos down his arms, and banged girls like it was his part-time job. I had run into him by chance a week or two earlier and this was my first time hanging out with him for a whole night.
As you can imagine, his “can I pee in your butt?” comment wasn't entirely successful. In fact, I think just about every girl ran away from us in horror. Matt was drunk and I was seriously questioning what the hell I was doing out with him.
But then something funny happened. A couple girls laughed. And then suddenly another girl actually hung around and kept talking to us.
Needless to say, back in 2006, there hadn't been anything written in pick up manuals that I had studied about how to transition out of a “can I pee in your butt?” opener. So I stood there awkward and confused, waiting to see how this would turn out.
Next thing I know Matt is telling her he’s going to lick her butthole tonight...
OK, forget this, I’m going home. I don’t want to be associated with this clown when he gets us thrown out of the bar, or worse, arrested for sexual harassment.
About fifteen minutes later, Matt finds me, and surprisingly he’s got his arm around the girl he had been talking to. She’s got a huge smile across her face.
“Hey man, we’re heading back to her place, it was great hanging out, we should do it again sometime.”
I sat there in the bar alone, trying to piece together what I had just seen. It made no sense and went against everything I had ever known about women my entire life.
To this day, this was one of the most pivotal nights for me as far as understanding attraction is concerned. Was it that I learned that “can I pee in your butt?” is the right thing to say?
No, actually, I still think it’s a pretty awful thing to say. And truth be told, in hindsight my friend Matt had a lot of narcissism going on.
But what I learned is that regardless of what you say to a woman, the intention and implications of why you are saying it are far more powerful than the words themselves.
You can say the lamest and grossest (or funniest, depending on your perspective) thing to women, and if the sub-communication is, “I really don’t care if you laugh or run away horrified, but here’s who I am, take it or leave it” this sub-communicates a rock-bottom level of investment and an incredibly high level of vulnerability.
Does this mean that saying grotesque things to women for no other reason than to self-amuse will get you laid? Not always. And not necessarily often. But you could do worse.
Does it mean that you should go out and try and say things like this? To ‘fake it till you make it’ with this line and other offensive lines? Well, actually, no. Do you know why?
Most men can relate to the idea of trying to “pick up” a woman without looking like they’re trying. Or trying to be cool without looking like they're trying to be cool. Entire books and schools of dating advice have been built on this idea — pursuing a woman without actually letting her know that you're interested in her.
Just typing that paragraph feels exhausting. Talk about a lot of work for nothing.
Like I described before, this performance-based stuff works sometimes, but it’s a short-term solution that requires a lot of time and effort. In my opinion, it’s a terrible investment of time and effort. You may as well invest that time and effort in yourself and let your identity and honesty do all of the attracting for you.
After all, why learn how to fake being cool, when you can just learn to become cool yourself?
On top of that, walking the tightrope of pursuing her without looking like you're pursuing her requires a lot of attention and effort. You can slip up easily. It's very unforgiving and ultimately, not a very enjoyable process. Besides, all of the attention and effort on "gaming” women this way ironically encourages you to be even more highly-invested and needy, therefore decreasing her likely attraction for you.
Men avoid demonstrating an honest interest in a woman because they believe it will signify that they are too invested in her, it will show that they are needy. They think that when you say, You're cute and I wanted to meet you that translates roughly to, “I’m such a desperate loser that I’m just going to throw all of my desires out there right now and beg you to accept them.”
But remember, it's not the actual behaviors or words them-selves, it's the intentions behind those words. There’s a world of sub-communication going on behind a man’s honest declaration of his interest. And it's an attractive one.
Because when a man comes right out and says he's interested in a woman, the sub-communication is actually, I’m totally OK with the idea of you rejecting me, otherwise I would not be approaching you in this manner. Therefore,
I'm comfortable with myself and my prospects.
Think about it, if a guy wasn’t comfortable with the prospect of a woman rejecting him, he wouldn’t have been honest in the first place. In fact, he would have pretended that he wasn’t actually interested in her!
The fact that he honestly expressed to her his intentions, that he put his nuts on the chopping block and made himself vulnerable to her immediately, actually sub-communicates non-neediness and attractiveness in itself. And on top of that, it shows desire for her, which is going to trigger her arousal.
Remember: what you actually say doesn’t matter; why you say it matters.
Always. No exceptions. You can have the best line in the world, but if you’re saying it because you're needy and desperate for validation and approval from women, then she is immediately going to sense it.
This is why using pick up lines is ultimately a futile process.
I could sell you the best 100 things I’ve ever said to women, but I can’t ever sell you my intentions or my confidence in myself. You must develop those on your own. And once you do, the actual lines you say will be personal and congruent to you and nobody else.
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