Feeling, Building, and Managing Sexual Tension

[PrettyDecent]

Hey fellas,

Thought I'd throw a quick post to the boards before heading out for the evening

When I first started this journey (meeting women), I'd talk to a lot of women, and I was getting laughs and comfort pretty quickly. But when I grabbed their phone number, they generally weren't answering or were pretty stubborn about planning a date. Of course, the reason for flaking and bad numbers isn't the same for everyone - but sexual tension is a key part in making any interaction move forward. She needs to feel some initial spark of attraction before she complies with you. So hopefully this post shall shed some light for folks struggling here!

The keywords are tension and pressure. When you're in a conversation with a girl, she should be feeling nervous around you. And here's the secret: you ought to be feeling nervous, too! Why is this? Because tension is felt by both people, but one cracks during the pressure, and the other puts up a face of calm. If you've ever heard of the game "chicken", you'll know what I mean - two people in their cars drive toward each other in a potential head-on collision to see who will bow out first. The guy can win and the girl will continue to feel (more) sexual attraction toward him, or he'll lose and be that much closer to the friend-zone.
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Here are some examples:

Eye-Contact: If two males hold EC, it increases the tension between the two, and the way to relieve it is to duke it out! If you hold EC with a woman (MUTUALLY!), it increases the tension between you two, and she wants to relieve it...notably by shagging you! So that's advice prescribed by the site before, but here's a corollary to consider...an activity that is not conducive to EC will prevent tension from building!

Here are activities that do that (and always think twice about doing them):

• Walking side by side
• Sitting next to each other instead of facing each other
• Only looking at her eyes occasionally, and staring off into space the rest of the time (obviously)

Jokes: Joking and banter will relieve tension, which is why it's so useful for the first few seconds of conversation (to suppress the enormous pressure of talking to a complete stranger), and so bad for anything after (obviously killing the "I'm-about-to-tear-your-clothes-off" vibe). It's tempting to make jokes if there's a tense feeling, and she'll actually laugh much harder during that time than any other...but consider that all that laughter was horniness a second ago...yeah.

Important Lesson: Tension is harder to build than release. Which means if you use a joke once or twice on the date, you're spending the rest of the time rebuilding that tension. Which is a good thing! Tension feels stronger every subsequent times its built...but that's also why it's so unstable - so while joking may be necessary, KEEP IT TO A MINIMUM.

Talking: With every word you speak, it relieves a little bit more tension. I'm not exactly sure why this is, but I know that when the guy talks it builds more 'comfort', and 'comfort' is the opposite of tense. And tense is the same as wanting to have sex (as a way of release). Pausing is the opposite of talking; hence why it builds more tension...

So, practical techniques:

• Keep talk to a minimum, and pause in between words or sentences with strong EC when appropriate. EC + Pausing = super tension building.
• Allow her to fill pauses in conversation most of the time (the exception being during transition points, when there should be little pausing)

Sexually Outcome-Independent: If the sexual tension is dying, DO NOT attempt to turn that around. It shouldn't have happened in the first place, but if you accidentally made a few too many jokes, or were talking too much, you need to keep steady with how you internally 'feel' rather than making her feel sexually-excited. You're playing with fire, here's why:

• If you attempt to turn around dying sexual tension, you WILL come off as chasing. You're in sexy mode (even though that's not how you truly feel), and she's comfortable just the way she is. It's like trying to physically escalate with a platonic friend. It ain't happening, and it makes you look desperate.
• If you decide to let the sexual tension die off, your demeanor looks like you're not giving her attention. You're aloof because you're losing your sexual interest in her (or so it appears to her). This is where the gamble comes in: either she decides its game over and ends the interaction while it's sinking OR she likes you enough to try and grab your attention again (and you start building sexual tension once more).

That came out a bit longer than I thought! If there are corrections to be made, please say. I'm hoping to bring a bit of unconventional advice to this post, so let me know if it helps you out

~Nick

 

[Marty]

Nick:

Very, very useful post.

The points on eye-contact, jokes and talking make total sense to me intuitively, and also highlight some problems I have in my own interactions (which Chase remarked upon also, actually) where I have myself gotten uncomfortable with the tension and introduced jokes at an inappropriate point, killing the "horniness" as you correctly observe.

I also used to think I was more comfortable sitting next to a girl (it just seemed more "loving") than the traditional date setup of staring at each other across the table... but thinking back on my recent dates in the light of what you wrote, now I realize I was completely wrong. That's exactly what helped to build tension, I could actually feel it happening. Presumably that why it's done that way... just like the low lighting and so forth. Thanks for helping me to rationalize intellectually what I should have felt intuitively, but didn't.

One thing that confused the hell out of me when I first started to read articles on seduction was the word "sexual" in "sexual tension". I was like: "Sex? Where did that come from? I just started talking with her!"

But now I realize that it's not so much "sexual" in the sense of "sexual intercourse", but "sexual" in the sense of "male-to-female". Just like "sexual attraction"... meaning I am drawn to her as a man is to a woman. It's our underlying sexual nature as animals—the same thing that causes us to feel attraction, as well as love—as opposed to the consummation of the sexual act itself, that we're talking about here. You may think I was slow to realize this but it just hit me.

Nick, the only thing I didn't really understand was the last section, on outcome independence. I think it could use a little more explanation... what should you, and should you not, do to recover from a situation where the sexual tension is waning, and why. I was confused by the talk of "internal feeling" and so on... maybe I'm just being obtuse but it'd be great to clarify.

Anyway, thanks for an excellent post.

-Marty

 

[PrettyDecent]

Hey Marty,

I had a feeling something was going to be amiss here, thank you for pointing it out so I could see it!

To answer your question - that last section basically means don't force sexual tension. There's a tendency (at least for me, which I presume extends to other people on here) to panic when sexual tension is dying - like, "Oh crap, if I lose the sexual tension now the interaction is DONE/I won't get laid tonight!" and then try to force tension with whatever means possible (sexual/chase framing/bedroom eyes/making a move).

The end goal is that you want to bring that tension back up - but it needs to look mutual and natural. That takes a bit of time because, like I described earlier, it's easier to release tension than it is to build it. So you make a reality-pacing statement with your behavior, instead. You want to meet her on the same energy she's feeling, then build up your tension up with hers at the same time - making the mood subtly sexual...then back up to where you were before (as opposed to immediately emulating the high sexual tension as before).

So if she's acting aloof when the tension dies, so do you. Then when/if she engages slightly more in the interaction, you up the ante. Then you start with the strong EC again. And after that, you start using the sexual frames again. This is opposed to her acting aloof, and then you trying to act really sexy to get her immediately turned on again. You're starting off from step 1, but by doing so it feels as though "things are just happening!" rather than "he's trying really hard to get in my pants".

Hope that clears it up! Funny enough, I'm actually much happier with the above explanation than the one I wrote in the original post

~Nick