OK, so there we have a question from Darth and he says, evil name. How do you deal with someone who you approach and ask for a number, but when trying to set the date out, she keeps saying, “I’m sorry, I’m very busy.” When you ask, “what’s your schedule like next week?”, she says, “my schedule is uncertain.” How do you escalate to the date? Do you keep persisting or what’s the next step?

I’m going to take this from the end. Do you keep persisting? Yeah, because why not? Why not? As long as you have the number on your phone, as long as you haven’t gotten an overt “No”, why wouldn’t you keep persisting? The real question is how do you keep persisting? What is the way that you can keep persisting and not be needy? And also, how can you make the transition from conversation to date more efficient? These are really good questions because these are probably some of the biggest things I see you guys do or get wrong over and over again in texting.

So first of all, do you keep persisting? Yes. However, don’t be the guy that just asks for a date over and over and over again. That’s one category of guy. One category of guy I see in texting is like “hey, what’s up? Do you wanna go out?” … “So you wanna go out?” “So you wanna go out?” “So you wanna go out?” And just very repetitive, very obvious. The girl knows she can have you. And to be fair, it’s needy and it comes off like it has an agenda. What you want to do is you want to mix in some normal conversation along with “do you want to go out?”

Secondly, what you want to do, and this is maybe one of the biggest things you can learn in text game, is called the soft close. Rather than just go from zero to “do you want to go out?”, there should be kind of a gradual ramping up towards the date. So for example, for me, a lot of times I do like a three question close. It’s something like “are you feeling adventurous?” or “are you adventurous?” And she says “yes” to that. And then I say, “what’s your view on this sort of activity?”, that’s maybe an adventurous activity or maybe something we might do on a date. She responds positively to that. And then I say, “OK, cool. What’s your week look like?” By now, she’s already kind of committed that she’s on board, and she’s shown an interest. She’s shown interest in me, in the activity. She’s qualifying to me, which means she’s trying to prove herself to be cool or going along with my agenda and my world view rather than trying to fight it or assert her own worldview. So, things are going very very well already before I make the plans.

And then when I do make the plans, he actually says, “what’s your schedule next week?”, which is good. A lot of guys what they’ll do is they’ll say, “let’s get together on Tuesday at 7,” and then if the girl just happens to be busy at Tuesday at 7, they’re setting up the situation where it’s going to go downhill very fast. It’s like, “do you wanna go out?” “No” “do you wanna go out?” “No.” And every single time the girl says “no”, it gets harder. The idea is to phrase it so at the first time you ask her to go out, it’s already set up nicely, so it’s likely to get a “yes” because every single time she says “no” and you have to back up and persist, it’s getting exponentially harder. So, the third time you cycle through this process of “do you wanna go out?” “no” some other stuff “you wanna go out?” “no”, it just gets harder and harder.

So, really work to set the frame and set the situation right the first time. And how do you do that? Again, by building up to it gradually, not being boring boring boring suddenly date, and then through doing that, soft close—sequence of questions to the close rather than just out of nowhere “let’s go on a date, 7 o’clock Tuesday.” All right. So those two principles are really going to help. When you do get a rejection, the key thing is not to ask again. Take some time, get the conversation good again, recreate the banter. And only once things are going well again, ask again.

The other thing you can do, if you are getting a lot of flakiness, I know this is like blasphemy in 2018, is pick up the phone and use the phone as a phone. When I first learned text game, it wasn’t even text game, it was phone game because you would pick up the phone and call the girl and she’d answer. Nowadays, girls don’t answer their phone as much, but if you can get her on the phone, you’re gonna have a much better probability of setting the date. And also, she’s much less likely to flake after you set the date. So couple of good things for that.

Or if you’ve been texting back and forth, pick up the phone right then and there and just get her on the phone because you know she just texted you. The other one is if she texts you something that is really complicated or really convoluted, like there’s a compound question: “I’m doing this”, “what’s this?”. It would be a long text back. In that case, sometimes just pick up the phone. And because it’s a situation where picking up the phone made sense, even if she doesn’t pick up, you haven’t really lost much in terms of social capital. But yeah, if you can actually get them on the phone or better yet, FaceTime or Skype, if you can get a face to face conversation, those are way better than texting.

So, if you have been watching this channel and you want to get your question answered, well, ask it below cause that’s where I’m getting the questions from. So, if you want to be featured on this channel, if you have a question, something is burning, you’re like “I need Todd’s opinion on this,” ask it below. Even if you’re just curious, ask below.