The Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want (25 page)

  Creating art

  Playing an instrument

  Reading or writing fiction

  Going fishing

  Golfing

  Reading or writing poetry

  Collecting something

These all share common elements: they are ways that people choose to spend their time—you have passions, I have passions, and the girls you meet will have passions.

Let’s look at some typical ways that passions are dealt with in conversation:

Girl:
Actually I practice ballet. I’ve done it for ten years.

Guy:
Cool, you must be very flexible.

Or, in response to the girl’s same comment about ballet…

Guy:
Cool, I saw
Swan Lake
.

Or…

Guy:
Ugh—my mom made me do it when I was a kid. I hated it.

Or…

Guy:
I’d like to see you in your tutu.

Or…

Guy:
Me too!

Or…

Guy:
Cool, I like football.

This covers a lot of the common responses to ballet or any other passion.

Let’s think about this for a second. The girl has revealed to a guy—let’s say you—something that she’s very passionate about. She’s done it for ten years, purely out of a personal sense of commitment. And yet in all the above examples, her offer to you has been rejected. You might as well have asked if she likes oranges, because you’ve treated her passion in a superficial way. If you’re going to take any of these approaches to things that matter, you might as well stay on superficial subjects.

Don’t dismiss her passion in any of the above ways.
Connect
with her on it. You could lie and say how much you love ballet. I don’t like to lie, so I wouldn’t do this. What you
can
do even if you hate ballet is be empathetic. Imagine why she loves to dance, what she feels when she dances. By expressing that empathy, you show that you understand why she loves ballet without saying that
you
love it. It’s something she’s probably never heard before from a guy, and it establishes the soul-mate connection.

My answer would be made up on the spot following the guideline of seeking to empathize as to why she might love ballet:

Me:
Wow, that’s so cool. You must be very dedicated to have kept it up for ten years. I mean, when you’re young it’s easy, but as you get older you get more and more commitments.

This is a standard connection for any long-term committed passion.

Or…

Me:
So you must really love dancing. Most people have their nine-to-five jobs and come home and watch TV. It’s refreshing to find someone with a passion that’s expressive and artistic.

This is standard for any artistic or creative passion.

Or…

Me:
People might think that dancing is just learning steps and performing them, but I think it really brings out the soul in someone. You can dance robotically by perfectly learning the steps, but it’s when you really
feel
them that you become great.

I also imagine that it’s a way of expressing your feelings through the movement of your body, like an artist does on canvas or a musician does through an instrument. When you’re in the moment, you’re expressing yourself through the way you move. It must go back to before we communicated with speech and used dance and ritual to express our emotions.

I’d love to see you perform sometime.

You can see why this is so powerful. It can be applied to any passion, whether you empathize with it or not.

Listed below are some things that you probably don’t do yourself, but that doesn’t mean you can’t connect with people who comment about their love for these activities:

Fishing is about being with nature, experiencing serenity (being alone with your thoughts), and enjoying anticipation mixed with excitement when you catch something.

Stamp collecting is about a sense of achievement. Each stamp has a memory attached because it’s from a different time in your life. Your stamp book is like a book of memories.

Going out and getting drunk on a Friday night is about how you’ve been stressed at work all week and are finally able to be yourself with your friends, completely in the moment. It’s about just feeling the enjoyment without a care in the world—that sense of release from it all.

You may be feeling swamped about now, awash in techniques and approaches you need to remember. Take a deep breath. None of this is rocket science; it’s just not that hard. If you can carry on a conversation, you can get a girl.

Before we move on to using touch as a tool to take you to rapport and beyond, let’s see if we can’t consolidate the needed conversational skills.

Let’s start with eye contact, that most basic form of communication. Most guys either break eye contact nearly all the time, or break it at exactly the time when they should maintain it. A small number of guys have a creepy, weird, or just generally bad form of eye contact that makes a woman uncomfortable. Instead of avoiding eye contact (as experience has probably taught them to do), these guys need to work on their problem.