I’ve been thinking about trusted networks recently.

Daygame is risky in the #metoo era – some women can have a bad reaction to your approach if they don’t find you attractive or are just having a bad day or for any number of reasons beyond your control, but which are still 100% your fault for engaging her feminine chaos. Fear of chaos is the root of approach anxiety. It is overcome by self-confidence that you can handle that chaos. Girls cannot articulate that, but they respect it.

For me it has been approximately 1/1000 approaches where a girl was visibly upset by my approach. Before whatever random feminist finds this blog says “That’s one woman too many!” it should be noted that I took some verbal abuse from those women on the spot, and stood like a tree trunk. Then BOTH of them apologized to me. One apologized about 2 seconds later and the other said “if it makes you feel any better, I have a boyfriend.” It didn’t make me feel any better, I waived her off as her momentum had been killed and she was just standing around after going off on me and backpedaling and then didn’t know what to do next. I didn’t care and was ready to go onto the next approach.

Anyway, things get dangerous when white knights step into the picture – guys trying to be chivalrous in front of the girls and “protect” them in hopes of getting laid. What those guys are missing is that those behaviors were originally intended to impress a girl’s parents, not the girl. Girls didn’t evolve to appreciate white knight behaviors until it was their own daughter they were auctioning off to the most eligible knight. Romeo was not the white knight that the Capulets had selected for Juliet in fair Verona.

A good old fashioned mob from twitter starts with a few ragey cagey feminists, often a journalist or two, and then some white knights pile on in hopes of getting noticed. They have no qualms about doxing and harassing people, attacking their livelihoods openly and directly, so it’s not unwise to be anonymous.

Some guys have to shed their anonymity to promote their content, and I guess that’s OK. Others do it for authenticity – and while that’s respectable, it does limit you to the Overton window somewhat, and cause future risk to your career if the Overton window shifts. It’s a commitment to a viewpoint that can fall out of favor. Life is long and people will dig through your old twitter for the strangest reasons.

Anyway, those of us with jobs that would be considered more traditional careers in NYC mask ourselves and operate while sharing daylight with white knights, betas with girlfriends that chose them and never had reason to question anything, harmless gay dudes, feral urban women, and of course the woke NYU journalism majors (if you meet a girl from NYU journalism is a safe guess). Any one of them can blow your cover and start a mob against you, trying to dox you, call your employer and get you fired for being a mysogonyst or whatever darker slurs they can come up with. I’m not super afraid of being doxxed, I think I could handle it, but there would be an opportunity cost of distracting me from the stuff I want to do – dealing with vitriol from people I don’t care about is a waste of time. I don’t write for them. I write to find others that belong in the trusted network.

Trusted networks are important. When you get into game – you usually start meeting guys from some online group or lair as it was called by Neil Strauss in “The Game,” and the guys in any given group are all over the map. A regular ragtag group of misfits that would never be put in a Disney movie to succeed against all odds. I’ve found that maybe 1 in 10 is actually worth maintaining contact with despite whatever personality flaws they may have (and they all do, I do too). The best filter I have come up with is to only connect with people who I’ve seen approach. A number of guys just want to hang out and talk about getting girls but not actually approach. Strangely, they also like to talk online, and consider getting a number to be a big fucking deal. It’s almost like they hope that by hanging out with you, something rubs off on them but they don’t want to do any work. When I meet a new daygamer on the street (usually they approach me), I used to like to watch them approach a few times before exchanging numbers – I didn’t realize how common it is for people to read a little bit about daygame and claim to be good at it, and then they are terrified to run up to a 6.5 and tell her she has interesting shoes to even warm up. It’s unfortunate how effective this filter is, but it works.

Thank you ladies for being the filter that helps us men test other men. We appreciate it.

To a beginner it may sound heartless:

“Runner – you were a beginner once too! Didn’t anyone take a chance on you?”

No, actually. I did daygame alone for the better part of a year. I knew Nash from doing nightgame, and he started doing daygame when I was originally going to learn daygame (but then I got a girlfriend). Since he lived in a different city and was ahead of me on the daygame learning curve, my only companion was a What’sApp chat with him where I recorded a note for each approach I did. It was just enough of a dopamine hit to keep me going.

After a few months of doing daygame, I met Cova at a lair meetup and he was probably the best daygamer I knew of at the time in NYC, and he asked me how long I had been daygaming. I was only a few months in and I think I had gone on my first date from daygame at the time or was just about to, and he just sort of disappeared and ignored me. 8 months later we met up to do some approaching and he didn’t remember me, and encouraged me to approach a girl in a store, and I ended up seducing her on the first date and dating her for a month or so. Cova is a bit of a dick, the kind of guy that gets a charge out of approaching a girl you want to approach (bad form for a wingman), but he made me earn the right to be a wing, and that was the right challenge for me, and probably for him as well. We still hang out from time to time, and he challenges me a little and I respect him for it.

Sometime last year, I was approached by a fellow I call Blackbeard (he does not have an online identity but he reads Twitter and blogs) one day after I did an approach in Union Square. We talked a little bit and I watched him do some approaches. He had only read Roosh and watched some Torero, and was approaching girls by walking ahead of them and then turning back at a 45 degree angle, not front stopping (that was the first correction). He needed a lot of work, but he did the work. He approaches even more than I do. I suggested he take an improv course and be transparent with the instructors, telling them that he wants to be more expressive. He’s made tremendous progress, and he’s young too, so he’s going to have an interesting life. I’m proud of him, and I trust him.

So a guy that approaches girls can be trustworthy. Are all guys that approach girls trustworthy? No. Are all guys that don’t approach girls untrustworthy? No. Are guys that talk a big game about approaching girls and then don’t untrustworthy? I think so, until proven otherwise. They need to grow up.

However when we have this anonymous network of guys who have developed the skill of approaching women, and we are prevented from sharing openly due to hostility and threats of persecution, trust is important. Approaching is hard to fake. Girls know it and guys who approach know it. It’s a good basic filter.

I’ve updated my blog template to be both more readable, and also to include a sidebar of people that I have met in daygame that I trust – guys that actually approach, and have taught me things and that I have met in person.

The Red Quest has written about trusted networks in non-monogamous communities:

People who are doing events will monitor newcomers for negative and positive traits and guys […] who can’t handle it will not be invited into the higher tiers of things. –The Red Quest

…and this applies to daygame as well. Some guy lied about his skill level to Mr.V and met up with him and later that day me and Cova joined them in Soho in NYC. He was dressed poorly, telling us who to approach (“I’m spotting targets for you guys!”), clearly had not done more than 10 approaches but had read a blog once about daygame. I think after that Mr.V said to me his new policy is “no new friends.”

However, I encountered Breeze (who opened a girl I was about to open) and then proceeded to get her number. I didn’t approach him, but I made a mental note of what he looked like, and then a week later he lost a girl to Mr.V (Crayon), but came and approached him afterward and I recognized him from earlier. He was like “Oh I follow Runner, Nash, RoyWalker” and it was amusing to meet him that way. He had such a good vibe and I had already seen him approach, so it wasn’t long before he was added to the trusted network.

There have also been questions about some people’s true stats recently – and some people claiming to do daygame but also mixing in night game, gutter game, online game, and there are rumors of even some guys using seeking arrangement and calling it game. I guess I’m more of a daygame purist at this point (having done nightgame and online game before deciding to do daygame). I’m not a fan of online game, and I openly look down on seeking arrangement. If it helps them achieve their goals, then OK, but as soon as people start to make claims about their stats it affects their credibility. Egos are funny things, and sometimes people need to pump their stats to feel good about themselves or to tell themselves they are better than others. There is no surer sign that someone is unimportant and should be ignored. This is why we can’t have nice things. There is a lot of this kind of fronting on twitter – selling courses, e-books, and building followers, and people will sometimes take this fakery at face value. Some might say they do damage to the community – teaching vulnerable young guys the wrong lessons and making them even more bitter when results don’t appear. That may be true. However, the trusted network roots out these kind of behaviors quickly and ruthlessly, and appropriately, the fake people tend fizzle out over time:

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. –Often Attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but likely William J. Groo in 1886

Naturally, the fake guys are quietly excluded from the trusted network.

In German there is a word männerbund, which can be translated as ‘male bond’ or possibly ‘masculine society’ (according to some guy on reddit), but I like to think of it as a male social hierarchy where guys are strongly collaborative with each other – the best example would be a group of guys in a military unit – they depend on each other in life and death situations and that forms a bond that can (and usually does) last for life.

As daygamers, we are doing guerrilla warfare against silly social rules put in place by Hollywood and listening logically to girls talk about how they want a man to approach them (they know it when they feel it but the female ability to actually articulate it properly is ultra rare – yet every girl thinks she is that ultra rare girl that can articulate it and it must be true for all women – the paradox of solipsism). This guerrilla warfare bonds us daygamers together like a military unit. We can’t talk about it openly, but we have to execute to get results.

Sports teams are a proxy for this, which reminds me of one of my favorite twitter aphorisms recently:

Some of you didn’t play sports growing up and it shows. -Many Retweets on Twitter, no idea on the original source

Daygame wings can’t do the work for you, and with a nod to my running sport background, it’s not a team relay either. It’s a solo sport and winging is just about vibe maintenance and keeping each others vibe warm between approaches. Keeping morale up between waves of rejection. However, when you have a trusted network, you get more than that. You get genuine encouragement to keep going. Others get excited for your successes and you get excited for theirs. You step out and even though you are alone, you feel like they have your back. Your wings are with you in spirit. You belong. You’re in the tribe, absorbing the knowledge of the tribe, helping to advance the tribe. This is a good thing. Trusted networks are the real value of daygame.

In a trusted network, higher level opportunities become possible. Depending on who is in your network, you can get access to social circles, employment opportunities, mentoring, and business deals because people trust you and like you. In my opinion, this is way more valuable than selling your ebook on how to approach girls for $17, but maybe that’s because I have a good network.

To get in the trusted network you have to go through the trials of women. Getting over approach anxiety. Getting in good enough shape and dressing well enough to have a chance. Improving your frame and learning to lead and seduce. Managing to keep a good vibe throughout all the ups and downs, and numerous other self improvements that are different for each man. Become a high value guy and join the club.