Guy Game 201: What to Say and When to Say It
The screenshot came from this story, “Short term, open to long.” It’s a good post, and I bring it up here because sometimes even women know they can’t tell other women the full truth for their own good (spoiler: she ends up being glad she came out).
This is why men have to learn what to share with women, and when, especially early on in the dating process. I don’t mean being domineering or patronizing—you should never do these things, and ideally she’s doing most of the talking and we’re being good listeners. What I mean is being careful what, and how much we share, and when. Like any good story, if we give away too much at the beginning and leave little to mystery, the reader may stop having already satisfied her interest, or decide it’s not to her taste before giving the narrative a chance.
If you’re curious about the crucible men must pass through in the modern romantic marketplace, read this post. It explains why men have to be strategic and tactful when it comes to the game of mating and dating. The TL;DR is that women today are extremely picky, and this is why men have to hold their cards close to the vest!
We can’t control what other people do; we can control what we do. If we give a woman too much information, or information that is irrelevant, we enable her to make a bad decision, and many of them will! Some men may ask: “why would I want to date a woman who’s overly picky or unreasonable?” The answer is two fold:
Women are—for good reason—picky about the men they date and are therefore prone to being, at least some of the time, unreasonably so
Once you pass the selection criteria, your “flaws” won’t matter
Our first gift to any woman we end up in a relationship with is helping her NOT make an unforced error early on. The ironic truth is that once she connects with you, likes you, see’s the good in your soul, and experiences the benefits of your attention, she won’t care about irrelevant information she might sift through on a dating app. Once the holy trinity of romance is in place—attraction, connection, and benefits—everything else ceases to matter.
Never tell anyone anything they don’t need to know. Honesty is a virtue, but everyone knows you’d be an idiot to tell a cop you’re drunk. In the dating phase of relationships, women are looking for reasons to reject, and the more information you give her—even if it seems totally harmless—could become a reason she finds objectionable.
The reason I’ve categorized this as Guy Game and not general dating advice, is that men mostly don’t care about irrelevant criteria like women do. As long as the attraction, connection, and benefit requirements of a relationship are satisfied, we’re good to go. I’ve never heard a man say he can’t find a woman who “checks all the boxes,” but I’ve heard hundreds of women say it. Men don’t have a 6-6-6 rule, we have a SFN rule: if she likes to snuggle, fuck, and is nice to me, she can stay.
So while there might be some things a woman shouldn’t share, it likely wouldn’t matter if she did.1 Plus, women are socially smarter and more adept than men by nature. So they already get what I’m about to tell the bros.