Flame on the attraction thought process
From Ladder Wiki
Surfer
Hey, So I was talking some girl shit over with a friend, and he was told me that I over analyze shit too much. He says I treat interactions way too much like poker hands, if you play internet poker or poker seriously you know what I'm talking about. Basically what I tend to do is to try and not *think* too much when I'm actually with the girl, I just try and go with the flow. But after the nights over, I tend to kick every aspect of what I did and more or less what she did, and I try and figure out what’s going on, what I can do better, etc.. Similarly in poker, you pick hands that are abnormal and try to figure out where you went wrong, if you did. My friend thinks this is bad because it winds me up too much, and he makes the point that unlike poker, you won't arrive in similar situations over and over again. However, when you play poker well you don't necessarily think about what you need to do, you just feel it/know it and the necessity to analyze decreases, this is what I'm hoping will happen with my game. I was also reading some archive forum post by Bob, and yeah there was something about not over analyzing things, but it seemed to be about when you're in the moment.
So, considering that this forum is devoted to scrutinizing other people's relationships or lack there of, can my analyzing things really hurt me?
Flame
Well, think of it this way:
Attracting and fucking a woman can be viewed as a game, but I don't know if poker is the best comparison. Instead, a better analogy might be like... skiing or something.
When you ski, every slope is different. THere are different patterns to the snow, differences in steepness, moguls, posts, signs, trees, and other obstacles. However, the technical aspects of skiing are almost always the same (the parallel turns, learning to shift your weight, keeping your eye out and gauging the terrain, etc.).
After you get down every slope, you can think about your mistakes and what made you fall however many times you did. If you don't at least ask about and fix your mistakes (your ski positioning, etc.) then you'll never get better and you'll never be able to ski down ANY slope without falling a few times. However, that's why you fix your mistakes. Either you try something new or you ask an instructor to tell you what you did wrong. Also, these individual aspects of your skiing become INTERNALIZED and you are able to make on-the-fly adjustments, etc.
However, it's important to remember that once you're actually ON the slope, skiing down at top speed, there's almost no time to step back and coolly analyze the situation. You're speeding down the mountain and you have to ACT. Also, as you try new trails/slopes, you don't know what's really coming until you're actually there.
What you should be doing is analyzing where you went wrong at the end of the night, making a simple yet precise list of things you think you could've done better on, then consciously working on those things the next time around. For example, I used to always inadvertently look down at the ground when a hot girl was talking to me. I realized this was happening and began making a fixed attempt to always maintain eye contact. In short, I was paying attention to my eyes.
Eventually, I just became used to making and holding eye contact comfortably. Nowadays, I don't need to actively THINK about doing it. I just do it.
This applies to most of the things that go wrong in a guy's interaction with women. Even the most fundamental and abstract principles (such as keeping the prize mentality, being confident, not letting her dominate the frame, etc.), even these concepts can eventually be INTERNALIZED through conscious effort.
Yes, when you are with a woman, you have to just go with the flow and be yourself. But "yourself" obviously had some flaws, or else you wouldn't be where you are with women. There's nothing wrong with actively analyzing and fixing flaws.
