There are many canned openers out there:

Asking a female opinion on what to call a 3 legged cat

Who’s more vain, guys or girls?

Is kissing cheating?

They can all be delivered in 30 seconds or less and are very easy to learn. So the budding PUA learns around 3 of these, and eagerly ventures into the field to test them out. If his body language, facial expressions and voice tonality are all correct, and on top of this he uses false time constraints he should get a good reaction from the set over 50% of the time (I get good reactions maybe 25% of the time… I need to work on my “I’m just about to walk off body language”, smile, and on speaking louder. Having to repeat an opener kills it).

So you open, giving it your best smile, making lots of eye contact, all the while looking like you’re just asking the question before walking off to rejoin you’re friends, and the set is all smiles and listens to what you are saying. If you use an opinion opener, like those listed above, then this may generate one minute of discussion from the set. So the question is: then what?

This has been my biggest problem recently. At first I just needed to overcome approach anxiety, so I’d open a lot of sets, but then eject after the opener. This meant that I never knew what to do after opening. This sounds a bit lame, as in, “This dude doesn’t even know how to have a conversation!”. This is not quite fair. While I wouldn’t say I’m fully socially adept yet, neither am I socially inept. The truth is that the conversation that follows after opening a set of girls isn’t like most other conversations you’ll have in day to day life. The reasons are as follows:

If the conversation doesn’t flow easily, the girls will quickly start to wish you’d leave them alone

You will be speaking to people who you don’t know anything about, in contrast to the people you speak to in day to day life who you’ll usually have something in common with

The 90/10 rule: you’ll usually have to put 90% of the effort into keeping the conversation going in the early stages of a set

All these points make conversation after opening a set harder than it would be in most other circumstances.

After opening you need to start building attraction. This means flipping enough of the little attraction switches in her girl brain until a big light goes on in there, and boom she wants you. I believe this is quite a difficult skill. If it wasn’t, then many more people would get laid much more often just by cold approaching and chatting for a bit. So here I have a dilema. I need to go deeper into sets, in other words, have sets which last longer. In order to do this I should be saying things to the girl which will build her attraction for me. Thing is this will take a long time to master, and at the moment this leaves me nothing to say after opening.

I have found the solution to be to ignore building attraction for now. It’s unlikely that I’m going to get many women into bed at such an early stage in my PUA ‘career’ anyway. So for now I will just go deeper into set by just ‘fluffing’ with the girl. ‘Fluffing’ is basically making small talk with a woman. It is far easier than building attraction, and doing this will allow me to get comfortable with going deeper into sets, and will help me get rid of that feeling of, “I bet she just wants me to fuck off” that often builds as I talk to girls for longer and longer.

When making small talk after opening, I’ll often pick up on something the girl said and run with that. This can sometimes be hard, so for each of my set openers I have a list of a few possible follow ups. These are all written down on my iPhone for easy reference. As an example, I’ll show you what I have written for the 3 legged cat opener:

Hi girls, I’ve got to find my friends, but can I just quickly get a female opinion on something first? My cousin’s an animal lover and she recently got a cat that was born with only 3 legs. My friends and I were talking about this and coming up with possible names for a 3 legged cat. If you had a 3 legged cat, what would you call it?

After the opener, I have the following reminders which could be used to create new conversational threads. On my phone I just have quick bullet points to remind me (I will typically read through these while on the tube on my way to a bar), but here I have also included an explanation for each point:

Hop along, tripod: These are the names I will say that my friends suggested for the cat

Are women kinder than men?: The names proposed by my male friends were kind of cruel, wanted to see if women were kinder can came up with nicer names

Would you ever have a 3 legged cat? If they say no, you can get them to qualify themselves by telling them that they are superficial

Any unusual pets?: Ask them if they’ve ever had any unusual pets. This could lead to an easy transition to getting them to talk about their childhood, and this is a springboard to more advanced techniques used to build attraction, like eliciting values

My goldfish when I was young: funny little story about my goldfish dying, floating to the top of the tank and me trying to convince my dad that it was like that because it was just sleeping. Again able to transition to talking about childhood

Wanted a Vietnamese pot bellied pig: I really wanted one of these when I was young, but my dad wouldn’t let me get one. This can be used to transition into asking her what she has wanted but never been able to get, again eliciting values.

In addition to this, I am also starting to work on a DHV (protector of loved ones) story about how I nearly died in order to let my little sister stroke. Sound’s crazy, but this one’s actually true. I’ve told it before, but without emphasis on the aspects which make it a DHV. It’s also quite funny, but with a hint of peril and fear, so it should be a good one to rouse emotions in my target.

Don’t get me wrong, not everything has to be scripted. If something interesting comes up when speaking to the set, feel free to take that ball and run with it. That said, if you’re like me and often struggle to keep a set alive after opening, do what I did. Note down a few possible conversational threads which seem natural to transition to. An important point to note is that these should not all be questions for them to answer. You must have stories or anacdotes of your own (real or imagined) which you can use to bring accross your personality to them. This also prevents the situation from feeling like they are sat in a job interview. I haven’t heard of many women who find being interviewed for a job sexy.