Re-Visiting Pick-up Dogma Part 1: Being Non-Reactive

I’ve been wanting to do a series for awhile, that looked at some of the most commonly expressed ideas in the Secret Underground Internet Seduction Community (SUISC) and held them up to a little bit more examination in 2011 as opposed to 2000-2005 when most of these ideas were espoused.

The first thing I wanted to talk about was the idea of being non-reactive.

The idea of being non-reactive is one of the most discussed ideas in the SUISC. With the majority of the advice advising one to “be non reactive no matter what!”, “Imagine what Clint Eastwood would do.” and one piece I recently saw even advised simply staring at the girl.

It all adds up to a some good information mixed with a bunch of bad metaphors that make it seem like the average guy starting out, needs to aim to be some sort of emotionless robot of pickup.

Which obviously is not correct.

So let’s delve a little deeper into what those wacky PUAs are really trying to get across.

First let’s start with the name, “being non-reactive” is misleading. You’re always going to be having a reaction in a social interaction, even if that reaction is simply to sit there and stare in silence(an option guaranteed to fail 100% of the time BTW).

So the goal of “being non-reactive” in it’s purest form is to sit there staring like a stone which obviously won’t help you get girls.

Instead what you want to strive for is not showing a negative emotional reaction, when you’re NERVOUS or things are going badly. The thinking here being that a girl is not a mind reader and if you don’t show any signs that you’re nervous or think it’s going badly, she’ll assume you’re confident.

The essence of “Fake it til you make it”.

Here’s the second problem, in most situations I read and listened to (and it was a lot Daddy likes research) the advice of “be non-reactive” was being given in situations(real or hypothetical) where an approach was ALREADY going bad.

You’ll rarely hear someone be told to “be unreactive” when the girl is eating up everything you’re doing. This re-affirms my point that the advice of being “non-reactive” is only relevant in situations where things are already not going well.

So instead of saying “be non-reactive” we could say always act like things are normal, especially when it’s not going well. Which is much more accurate and easy to understand advice.

My last problem with the idea of being unreactive comes back to the idea that EVERYTHING is a reaction. If we accept that everything is a reaction, then the best gameplan for getting a girl is not to “be unreactive” but instead to have the best possible reaction for the specific girl in the specific situation.

This is because as we all know all girls are different and each one has specific preferences. The more you can tailor your seduction (or personality if you’re a sociopath) to her individual preferences, the more successful you will be.

Hopefully that explains why the idea of being “non-reactive” sounds great in theory but in practice falls more than a little short of being good advice.