Text Game

Any dingbat can be a pickup trainer – for the first hour. It’s easy. The first hour you send your guy into set a few times and just watch. There’s no point giving him a two hour talk on how important it is to bait her into chasing… if he does this naturally already and his big problem is body language.

So you watch him, see what he’s all about. Then you give him his first sage advice. And 99% of the time it’s this. ‘You are talking too quickly’.

And that’s the first hour taken care of. I might start setting up a cardboard cut-out in Starbucks when I meet students for the first time. I can attach a tape recorder to the back of it. When the student sits down and says hello, it triggers into action.

‘Hello my mate. Go and speak to those girls over there’.

Then he comes back and it says:

‘That was not bad for a first try, but you were talking too quickly’.

I’d get an extra hour in bed and there would be no deterioration of service to my client. My two dimensional stand in would be right 99 times out of 100.

The other constant question they ask is:

‘What can you tell me about text game? I can’t do it, they all flake, what should I say?’

It’s the burning question on everyone’s mind, it seems. So, here are my first responses to the text game question.

Text game is important when you’re a novice and less important when you’re more advanced. The reason is because as you get better in set, you build a better connection and more fertile prospect, so you’re relying less on your texts to secure the date.

So the answer to the question is that it’s the wrong question. The date is won in the set, not in the texts. Don’t look to sharpen your text game – look to sharpen your sets.

It’s like focusing on how to fix broken eggs, what glue should I use, how do I keep as much of the goo inside as possible? It’s better to focus on having a cushioned basket that stops them getting broken in the first place.

For me text game was always just a necessary bridge between the set and the date. A continuation of the light fun conversation and bonding that was established in the set. The goal in text game isn’t to get a date. There’s obviously going to be a date, you said in the set ‘you and I, we should hang out sometime, we should go for a coffee’. The answer was ‘yes we should’ and numbers were exchanged. No, the goal of text game is to keep the fun alive and enjoy the banter and fun with her.

I like to text fairly soon after and just keep the set going. I don’t say anything like ‘Hey, it’s me Jimmy, the guy you met two nights ago’. I go straight into something like:

‘Now this is what I call a beautiful day. I’m hitting the lake; no doubt you’re not even out of bed yet!’

I just assume people remember me. We didn’t have just any conversation. We had THE conversation. Banter, name calling and just general chit chat (maybe with a touch of DHV) are the order of the day. You have a fun and flirtatious bit of fluff bantering with you. It’s the stuff dreams are made of. That’s the goal of text game.

If a date hasn’t transpired after a while, there’s no gambit, just say something like, ‘so… when am I going to fill you full of Mojitos’.

See below for an example of my initial text conversation. At no point was I trying to score a date. I was just chatting away.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmz9ouQ-rp8&w=560&h=315]

These texts went on for ages, but I only saved a few. We ended up playing a game where I had to find an advertisement in town that she was in (she’d done a bit of modelling and been in some billboard advertisement). I agreed to spend my day looking for her – and predictably I spent the day taking photos of cartoon animals and ridiculous stuffed toys and saying ‘found you!’

If you’re sensing your set’s a bit tentative, you could try seeding. Drop into conversation somewhere you like to go and casually say you’ll show her, then move the conversation on so as not linger on the invite. ‘The best ice creams are at Millennium. I’ll show you. They’re massive and the sofas are comfy’.

Buy I generally think, if she’s 50/50 on you, trying to resolve it in the text is high investment low return. Better to spend the time opening more sets than paining over what to do to win her over.

That’s why it’s important the texts are fun. If you’re just having fun chatting nonsense to another sentient human being, what’s the problem? Just enjoy the waffle for what it is and if sometimes it goes nowhere, then so what? Have three skirt texting you, have fun and just date the one who is the most fun. One gets offended at being compared to a hamster, so the fuck what? One wasn’t that keen in the first place, big fucking wow.

Good text will retain interest better than bad text. And it may often even spark interest when there was not so much interest there. There’s probably a book somewhere you could read if you want to learn more about it, but your texts will just get better over time, but generally I think you should focus your efforts and energies on better in set technique. Don’t try and fix broken eggs. Try not to break them in the first place.