Nerd Movie Reviews

A Guide to Nerd Guys Meeting and Dating Women: How to start talking to them Part 5

Time to delve into a tough subject for most nerd guys.  Shutting up and letting the girl talk.

This is tough for most nerd guys.  We start to feel nervous talking  to women and the defensive mechanism is to fill the awkwardness with examples of our wit and verve.  Also, we really think we need to impress her somehow by showing her how much intellect and knowledge we have.  However, this is a huge trap (thank you Admiral Akbar) that a lot of nerds fall into for most of their life.

Here is why it is a bad thing.  If there is one thing most women love it is a mystery.  Guys that are mysterious are by nature sexy.  Women feel compelled to dig more and more until they understand the guy as well as they can (which is pretty poorly, to tell the truth, but they like to believe they have accomplished their goal).  If you shut up early on and make her work for every tidbit then by the time she has you figured out you have been in a relationship with her for a couple years.

The fact is, familiarity breeds contempt.  No matter how cool and put together you or any other guy is, you have things that annoy women just by having a Y chromosome.  As a mysterious figure out of a romance novel she knows nothing about your bad habits or obsession with Boba Fett (shirt image courtesy of the Star Wars t shirt section) or any number of other things that she will have nothing but contempt for.  As she learns of them your chance of seeing her naked drops.

Think of it as a score.  When you first meet a girl imagine she assigns a score from 1-100 to you.  If you are super good looking or super rich you are probably in the 80-90 range.  If you are horribly disfigured or just the wrong body and/or facial type you might be in the 30-40s.  Most of us end up in the middle range.  Bottom line each girl has a minimum score they require in order to sleep with you.  Every time you open your mouth you risk losing points.  Granted, there is the chance of gaining points, but unless what you are about to say is “I am the owner of a multi-million dollar corporation” then I think it fair to say the odds of losing points grossly outweighs the chance of gaining points.

So bottom line, say next to nothing about yourself.  If I have done well talking to a girl then I know a ton about her (fodder for future conversations) while she knows my first name and maybe a vague idea of what I do for a living.  That’s it.  Every thing she knows about you is less chance to get anywhere with her.

I’m not saying don’t answer her questions.  That would be weird.  But every time she asks you something answer with as few details as possible and turn it into a question about her.  For example:

Girl: “So, Dave, what do you do for a living?”

Dave: “I run a web site.  We sell t-shirts.  What do you do?”

Girl: “I work in marketing.”

Dave: “Really?  Have you worked on any campaigns I might have seen?”

See how that worked?  I answered her question and gave her the opportunity to talk about herself for another five minutes.

Eventually she will learn all your bad habits and idiosyncrasies, but by that time you should be already sleeping with her and she will develop other relationship ties that will keep her from kicking you to the curb.

This point is kind of near to my heart, as it is the one piece of my advice I really struggle with.  It is so easy to talk about myself with a girl and say too much.  Just recently I was dating a girl.  She caught the flu or something and was sick, so instead of sleeping together we would talk a lot via phone and text.  Bottom line is she learned too much about me before we slept together and I got dumped.  Remember, familiarity breeds contempt.

Next post: the Two Minute Rule.

Tags: star wars t shirts, talking to women