Chasing vs. Pursuing

Here is an email from the guys at the Mystery Method.

Chasing vs. Pursuing by The Mystery Method 

It’s Sunday afternoon. You met a great woman on Friday or Saturday night, and followed the Mystery Method perfectly. You opened, you created attraction, you qualified, and then you started to build comfort. The situation wasn’t right for you to take it further, so you casually invited her to join you for some exciting event on Monday. She gave you her number.

You phone. It rings a few times and goes to her voicemail. You leave a message. She doesn’t call you back. It’s now Tuesday. What do you do?

1. Maybe call her again next week, but that’s it. You need to have the frame that you have lots of women interested in you and are busy, or else she won’t stay attracted to you anyway.
2. Call or text every day or two with a variety of different approaches, to see if any of them make an impact. Delete the number after a few weeks if you don’t get anywhere.
3. Call every day until she answers. Once in a while call three times in a row to see if that works. After a week or so, drop back to once a week or so. Don’t give up until YOU are no longer interested.

What’s the right answer? Don’t look ahead…

Actually, any of them could be the right answer. In the right context, all of these are okay. Too many beginners in the Mystery Method are too inflexible with the frame that "I have value…she has to come to me” and default to (A). Yes, this is a good frame, and it’s important. However, sometimes you need to do a little bit of pursuing as well.

Why is this? If you obviously have value, why should you have to pursue a woman? Why does she want you to? In short, it’s because this shows that you are genuinely interested in her. In fact, the more value you have, or appear to have, the more a woman will want to see you put in a bit of genuine effort to pursue her. She recognizes that you can have easy conquests, and she doesn’t want to be easy.

Why else? Some women are simply flaky and scatterbrained (so are some men). She may adore you, but you called when she was having dinner, and then she met up with a friend, and now it’s the next day, and she could call you, but now she’s distracted and, anyway, if you’re really interested in her you’ll call again, right?

Why else? She wants to play the traditional female role of being chased. It’s exciting for her, and built into millennia of social programming. It’s not a great frame for men to be in, which is why we short-circuit it when we first meet a woman by disqualifying ourselves during the attraction phase. That’s easy in public, where you can plausibly start a random conversation with an attractive woman without being interested in her (until she wins you over, of course…). It’s not easy on the phone. By calling, you are confirming your interest. That’s why it’s so important to qualify her when you first met, so she feels comfortable with your interest in her, but it does mean that you might feel a little bit of "back to square one” on the telephone. So, yes, she may make you work for it by not returning your phone call. Don’t take it personally.

Why else? Some women are taught "not to call guys”. Yes, it’s pretty silly, but there is just as much silly dating advice for women as there is for men (both you and I are lucky that we found the Mystery Method). There’s nothing you can do about this. Call them. You can fix their silly ideas later.

Now, we covered ages ago some of the crucial tactics to making you she does answer the phone when you call (programming your number into her phone, telling her when you’re going to call, planning a specific event, making her verbalize some anti-flake routines, texting/calling that night, etc.) as well as how to leave a message (leave hooks, cut yourself off, etc.) so we’ll assume that you’ve done all of this, and are still not getting her on the phone. You can give up, of course, and focus your energies on new women. This is totally fine. But you can also set aside a few minutes a day with your "cold” phone numbers and do some of this:

* Vary the time of day when you call. Morning, afternoon, evening, night. If you’re getting nowhere, try calling at 1am. You’ll wake her up, so make sure you can be immediately entertaining from the second she answers. (Start with a high-energy, funny, short routine. Don’t even introduce yourself).
* Call from different numbers
* Try sending text messages – some people simply prefer these to phone calls
* Don’t ever acknowledge that you are calling and she isn’t returning your calls. Adopt the frame – to yourself – that she is just a flaky woman and it’s kind of cute. Don’t let it cross your mind that she might not actually be interested in you.
* Don’t ever say "this is the last time I’m calling” or "I’m calling to leave you another message” – see above. And if you do get her on the phone, don’t even bring up the subject of your previous calls or texts.
* If you phone, and it goes directly to voicemail (and doesn’t ring at all), hang up.You got a free pass. If it doesn’t ring, it won’t show up as a missed call on her phone. She won’t see that you called. If it does ring, leave a message.

On the other hand, don’t turn "pursuing” into "chasing”. If she tells you not to call, stop calling. Don’t be creepy.