So let’s see what today’s question is. I find myself hooking sets and doing long sets, with the friends leaving me and the girl alone. That’s good. But they return toward the end of the night for some reason to take her away. Why would they do that if they left us alone in the first place? Obviously related to how to deal with the friends issue.

So first of all, the thing I would say is the why doesn’t matter so much as the how here, but I’ll try and get into what may be going on. And what I would say is probably the girl’s friends didn’t explicitly leave her with you. They probably were going about their night and they probably forgot about her, or they probably just felt she was safe, etc. So there’s a big difference between you were talking to the girl and the girl’s friends did their own thing or you happen to have isolated the girl’s friends, kind of like neglected it for a little bit, versus they explicitly decided to let you have her.

Now, at the end of the night when they’re going home and they’re thinking to themselves, “Well, who did we come with? Did we lose anybody along the way?”, now they’re going to remember the girl. And so it’s not quite a question of they gave her to you and then they took her back. They weren’t Indian givers. Politically incorrect term, I guess. But anyway, the point is that that wasn’t what they were thinking. It’s not like a conscious process in their part. It’s not like they decided they suddenly disliked you. They just never gave her to you in the first place.

Now, the ways to deal with this. One is really, really win them over. And that can happen sometimes. I’ve had situations where the girl’s friends come up to me at the end, and they’re like, “take good care of her” and shake hands, or like, “wow, you clearly like each other.” And that’s fine. Most of the time, what you’re gonna get is some kind of a middle ground where the friends tolerate you, but they’re not completely on board.

And so really what you want to do once you’re alone is do the proper work with the girl to set things up and find out the situation. So, find out how she knew her friends. Are they gonna be a problem later? Also, get the girl really bought in. A lot of times, leave before the end of the night. If you’re trying to pull right at the end of the night, I know a lot of pick-up artists recommend that, I actually don’t like that because that’s the time when all the friends are trying to come together and that’s the time when if one of the other friends got pulled, now your friend gets caught up in the drama. Whereas, if you pull earlier on in the night, before the friends know the night’s over, then it never becomes an issue. You want your girl to be the first member of the group to get pulled rather than the second one because when she’s the second one, it creates all kinds of issues.

It’s not like they turned on you and hated you later. It’s that they kind of let you be with her by accident or through neglect more than through a conscious decision. So it’s not like some kind of fuck-up later on. It’s just a situation where you’re doing well, you’re getting in isolation, but you need to make more of that situation either by winning the friends over more or by doing your work faster and better with the girl you’re with.