Dinner ran three hours. She laughed at everything. You walked her to her car thinking this one's locked in.
Then: nothing. Two texts. No reply. What happened?
You did what most men do on a great date. You filled every silence, answered every question, and left her with nothing to wonder about. No mystery. Nothing to sit with when she got home.
Rule 3 of the "22 Rules" changes the ending: tell her a little, hold back the rest, and let her imagination do the chasing. The ghosting stops too.
Your buddy Dave has been single for three years and thinks "hey u up" is a valid strategy. Your other buddy Mike just got dumped and told you to "just be yourself."
You showed them her text. You asked them to decode the emoji. You drafted four responses and sent the screenshot to the group chat for a vote.
She's been waiting forty minutes.
Put the phone down. Stop crowdsourcing your love life. Type something that sounds like you. Hit send. Then go do literally anything else with your evening.
@Dr.Suave How do you think I can get younger women interested in me. I'd LOVE to have a woman that age!
Find her and ask her out on a date. Find another one rinse & repeat.
I could talk to any woman I wasn't attracted to. Charming, funny, relaxed. Then a gorgeous woman looked my way and I'd become a sweating, babbling mess.
The fix took me years to find and ten minutes to learn. Nervousness and excitement are the same physical state — pounding heart, adrenaline, flushed face. Your brain just picks the label. And you can pick a better one.
Rule 16 shows you how. You feel the nerves, relabel them as excitement, and let that energy pour out as enthusiasm. Women notice the guy radiating it. They always do.
Are you down to hook up with a 40something divorce, likely with kids, who just in the market for a dude to chill with? Not joking here, Dave...
I agree it's a fairly random thing, but I don't think feminists made it up. If feminists made it up, they would have kept the ages closer, like "no more than four years apart".
Yeah I thought guys made it up.
@BaronOfHair Definitely!
I haven't seen any guys here thinking that Belichick is in a good place that they would like to be in though. Most just seem to think she's taking advantage of him for his money at best, and at worst, he's making a fool of himself.
You've said it a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. And every time you say it, you train your brain to freeze the next time she walks into the room.
Leagues are a myth invented by guys who are scared of women.
She's a person. She has bad breath in the morning. She picks songs she can't sing in the shower. She overthinks her own texts.
Walk over. Say something. The league dissolves the second you open your mouth.
There are worse ways to spend one's latter years
