All posts in Skills

Flirting With Intent – Advanced Flirting for Nerd Women Pt. 1

by Dr. NerdLove on May 14, 2012 in Advice, Dating, Skills with 65 Comments
Pro tip: Not like this.

Dr. NerdLove is on vacation this week. Rather than just giving you nothing but dead air or running a “Best Of” column, I bring you this excellent guest post from my friend, confidant and occasional provider of much needed corrections: Kira. 

Kira, the floor is yours.

Bringing the Boys to the Yard

Flirting is a great thing.  It’s a way to show interest without getting in over your head, and without getting kicked out of a conversation.  And it has a lot of nice side effects – you get to tell someone they’re beautiful without embarrassment, and once you get good at it you get to feel slick, and it’s always fun to make someone smile.

Flirting of any stripe is, essentially, verbal dancing:  For every positive sign you get, you give a little positive sign.  Nothing so explicit as to ruin the rhythm; just enough to make someone think a little.  Hopefully these positive signs escalate until you both feel beautiful, or you have a date, or whatever else you had in mind comes to pass.  But the key here is call and response, on the most immediate, most granular, most tactical level.

Everyone wins, because either everyone feels good, or one party backs out before anyone has a chance to feel bad.

OK, fine, it doesn’t always mean what you think it means.  Because messages in flirting are implicit, not explicit, it can be hard to figure out what’s going on.  For the recipient, it can be particularly hard to tell the difference between ‘flirting with intent’ – subtle un-said signals that mean I like you, and I’d like this to go somewhere – versus ‘flirting without intent’ – which people do for a host of reasons, or for no reason at all.

So, why not just declare your interest outright and save everyone the trouble?

First, flirting with intent allows the relationship between you and someone else to evolve naturally, instead of trying to hustle an innocent interaction into something else without stopping to let emotions catch up.  As the good Doctor says, it’s all about persuasion.

Continue reading “Flirting With Intent – Advanced Flirting for Nerd Women Pt. 1” »

How to Hook Up At A Wedding

by Dr. NerdLove on May 4, 2012 in Advice, Sex, Skills with 8 Comments
"No, please, tell me more about your bunionectomy."

 

The beginning of May means that there’s more in the air than an increase of ragweed and oak pollen. The chirping of birds and wind rustling through the wildflowers slowly begins to mix with the sound of bells ringing, signaling the beginning of another season, one that men and women look forward to with a heady mixture of anticipation and dread: wedding season.

If you’re of a certain age, when spring rolls around, you often find that your social calendar has filled up with friends and relatives racing to tie the knot. Suddenly your weekends are filled with rented tuxes, complaints about bridesmaid’s dresses, rehearsal dinners, awkward toasts and – if you’re especially lucky – an open bar.

For some, weddings are a time for celebration, paying homage to the union of two souls who were lucky to find love. For others, it’s a time to celebrate being single… because weddings can be one of the greatest places to hook up with your fellow young-and-horny types. Weddings get emotions running high… and all sorts of endorphins and hormones that scream “MUST. FIND. SEX. NOW.”

If you know what you’re doing, not only will you have a better time at all of those weddings you have coming up… you’ll get lucky too.

Continue reading “How to Hook Up At A Wedding” »

How To Approach A Woman

by Dr. NerdLove on April 30, 2012 in Skills, Talking To Women, The Basics with 10 Comments

By the time this goes up, it will be the end of April and the start of May. Hooray, hooray, the first of May, outdoor fucking begins today.

With the warm spring sun slowly turning to summer (or not so slowly for those of us who live in the south – THANKS GLOBAL WARMING!), we’re entering prime time for going out and meeting new, sexy singles. Women are breaking out the sun-dresses that cling to every curve while men are breaking out their shorts and tighter tees. Sex is in the air and everybody is looking forward to hooking up.

So there is no better time for you to brush up your skills and get ready to meet the woman of your dreams.

We’ve talked about how to get comfortable talking to women. We’ve covered what to say. I’ve taught you how to beat your approach anxiety.  You know what to look for to see if she’s interested in you.

Now it’s time to quit talking and start walking. It’s time for you to actually get out there and start meeting those awesome women you’ve been thinking about for so long.

Yes, it can be profoundly intimidating. Coming up to a total stranger and trying to get her interested in exploring the possibilities of  a sexual or romantic relationship with you can be difficult and stressful. In a lot of ways you’re making yourself emotionally vulnerable and being rejected can sometimes feel like a rejection of everything about you.

But fortunately you don’t have to worry; I’m here to walk you through the steps, as well as the common pitfalls that you need to avoid.

Continue reading “How To Approach A Woman” »

Conquer Approach Anxiety

by Dr. NerdLove on March 16, 2012 in Advice, Lifestyle, meeting women, Skills with 11 Comments
"So we were thinking of going to this wine bar later... would you like to join us?"

One of the hardest parts of meeting new people, for men and women, is that initial approach. Whether you’re in class, at the bar, hanging out at a party or at the bookstore, the idea of approaching that hottie you’ve had your eye on for a while sends shivers down your spine.

You take a step towards her, trying to figure out what you’re going to say. Your heart starts to pound. Your mouth goes dry as your palms start to sweat and your thoughts start racing. You manage to go through hundreds of worst-case scenarios in your mind, each worse than the last, in seconds. You freeze in place.

You’re suffering from approach anxiety. And it’s holding you back from meeting that hot girl or guy.

Approach anxiety is a particularly apt phrase created by the Pick-Up community to describe the feelings of anxiety and fear that we feel when we attempt to meet strangers that we’re attracted to. It covers the gamut from mild nervousness to full-blown panic at the very thought at trying to go up to an attractive man or woman and introduce ourselves.

It’s not terribly surprising that people suffer from approach anxiety. After all, you’re going up to someone – sometimes a complete stranger, sometimes someone you only know obliquely – a classmate, a regular customer, the hot barrista or store clerk – and trying to persuade them into being interested in you romantically and/or sexually. To the socially inexperienced, it can feel like you’re being judged, not just on what you have done at this specific moment but on everything that makes you who you are.

Approach anxiety is all about avoiding fear and conflict and how humans respond to fear stimulus. If you want to get over approach anxiety, you have to learn how to handle that fear and overcome it.

So let’s talk about just how you do that.

Continue reading “Conquer Approach Anxiety” »

5 Common Sexual Mishaps (And How To Recover From Them)

by Dr. NerdLove on December 5, 2011 in Health, Sex, Skills with 38 Comments
"Oh Dear God, what did you EAT??"

There’s nothing quite like sex to set every man’s anxieties on overdrive.

Men are competitive about everything. If a guy is into a subject or a hobby, he wants to believe that he is the master of it – if not of the world, than at least amongst his friends. Whether it’s cooking, grilling, video games or random geek trivia, every guy out there wants to be seen as the definitive expert, the number one guy.

When you throw sex into the equation however, it goes from a matter of competition and braggadocio to one of desperation and ego. It’s one thing when you have the highest kill/death ratio of your Call of Duty clan and you’re competing with anonymous drones who are nothing but meat for your cannons.

When it comes to sleeping with beautiful women, it’s no longer about getting your name at the top of the high scores list in the hopes of impressing your friends. It’s about making your mark. It’s about impressing her and all of her friends. You’re not competing with faceless nobodies: you’re now competing with every guy she’s ever slept with. Every guy she has ever gushed about to her girlfriends the next day. Every guy she’s Facebook friends with. You want to be the acknowledged master of her pleasure, the one that nobody will ever be able to surpass.

But just as no plan survives contact with the enemy, no fantasy survives contact with actual flesh. You may think that it’s going to be all candlelight and soft lens filters1 but when it’s time to bang, sometimes things go wrong. Maybe you say something wrong or maybe it’s just a case of you can’t quite perform the way you were hoping to.

Don’t panic. Just because things don’t go as planned doesn’t mean that you can’t recover from them… and even make sex better than ever.
Continue reading “5 Common Sexual Mishaps (And How To Recover From Them)” »

  1. or shaky hand-cams, Astroglide and passionate screams [↩]
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