How to respond to a girl’s email on an online dating website

Email 2 (If she did respond)

Hold her hand and guide her through the seduction process

So at this point, you have emailed her, and she emailed you back. Let the games begin. Now is when things get interesting. Your next couple communiqués are very delicate. Courtship is a series of steps. As Robert Greene (author of The Art of Seduction) writes:

“In a world of few formalities and ceremony, seduction is one of the few remnants from the past that retains the ancient patterns. It is a ritual, and its rites must be observed. Haste reveals not the depth of your feelings but the degree of your self-absorption. It may be possible sometimes to hurry someone into love, but you will only be repaid by the lack of pleasure this kind of love affords. If you are naturally impetuous, do what you can to disguise it. Strangely enough, the effort you spend on holding yourself back may be read by your target as deeply seductive.” ( Greene, Robert. “The Art of Seduction.” Penguin 2003, p.138.)

It is the man’s job to hold her hand and lead her through each phase of comfort and attraction building. What that next phase is, however, actually depends on you. If she lives far away, then your options might be limited. Long distance phone calls may be too expensive and she may not be ready to travel to your city yet. So in this circumstance, your next step is simply more email. Especially if you have the gift of creative writing and your target is one of those girls with a love for passionate emails.

If you are looking for a romantic relationship, the steps usually happen in something like the below manner.

You email her
She emails you
You email her
She emails you
You text her
She text’s you
You call her
She agrees to a first date
You attend the date and display your personality, ambition, and charm
She decides if she wants to dump you, have sex with you, or wait and see
You ask her out a few more times
If you build up enough sexual attraction, you sleep together during one of these rendezvous
Then you both decide if you’d like to have a long term committed relationship (possibly leading to marriage), a short term sexual relationship, a platonic friendship, an open relationship, or no further relations at all.

Anthropologist Desmond Morris provides us with a good outline of the progression of sexual relations.

Eye to body
Eye to eye
Voice to voice
Hand to hand
Arm to shoulder
Arm to waist
Mouth to mouth
Hand to head
Hand to body
Mouth to breast
Hand to genitals
Genitals to genitals

If you are not rapidly progressing through the courtship process, she will likely get frustrated, bored, find someone else, and simply lose interest in you.

Learn to spot open windows and jump through them.

Here’s a lesson I’ve had to learn the hard way. When a woman opens a window, you better be ready to jump through. If she does something bold like initiate a rendezvous time, then just say “yes” and get there. Remember, women take on considerably more emotional and physical risks than men do, when they invest their ‘sexual currency.’ So don’t mess around with open windows. Don’t make any dates you can’t keep. Displays of flakiness, flightiness, and aloofness are her job. But you’re a man. You say what you mean and do what you say.

If she says “call me,” then call her. Do not text her!
If she says “meet me,” then meet her.
If you feel a moment to kiss her, then kiss her.

You need to be progressing along through the stages of courtship.

Do not play scheduling games or frame games

I am completely convinced that most “dating scheduling conflicts” are a result of a lack of confidence (yours, hers, or both of you). There will always be “something else to do that day.” There will always be “something else to finish at work.” You have to decide now just how much your love life is important to you.

Let us suppose she writes the following:

“Can you make it for an early dinner Thursday? We can meet at Nick’s at 6:00pm?”

A lot of guys have a kneejerk reaction to respond with something like the following:

“Well I’m really busy then but I’ll try to get over there.”
“Can I get back to you on that one?”
“That’s a little early for me. Can we make it 6:15?”
“No I absolutely can’t make 6:00pm. But can you make it for 7″
“I can’t then, but I can make it ten minutes later.”
“Maybe.”

99% of the time, there was really nothing preventing you from making this date. Face it; in the vast majority of cases, you can make this time window. So instead, I suggest you simply respond with this:

“Perfect timing I’ll see you there at 6.”

It is not rocket science. We respond with eight words. One sentence. That’s it. We’re using minimal verbiage here because we don’t want to give her mind any fodder to dig in to. Women are notorious for their tendency to read ( way too much) into a man’s words. So keep it short, jump through her frame, and meet her there. Don’t insist on a quid pro quo agreement. In courtship, women jealously guard their sexual resource and they expect you to work for it. Women like to maintain some degree of control (or the illusion of control) in the early stages of a relationship. Because, at some level, she knows that a power shift happens the moment after she has sex with her suitor. As Neil Strauss wrote:

“Sexual choice, however, is one of the only areas where women are indisputably in control. It’s not until they’ve made a choice, and submitted to it, that the relationship is invertedand the man is generally back in a position of power over her. Perhaps that is why women, to the frustration of men everywhere, are so cautious about saying yes.” ( Neil, Strauss. “The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.” IT Books, 2005: p. 93.)

Do not become a video game

Sometimes, both men and women have a tendency to put off face-to-face encounters, and simply engage in mental masturbation—in the form of a continuous email exchange. Usually, this type of activity seems to come from a place of insecurity – individuals hoping to, in some way “keep up the fantasy,” all the while thinking that if the other party “knew the real me” then he or she “wouldn’t like me.” Additionally, you may find that a woman adopts a flirtatious persona online, but, when asked to actually meet in real life, she allays your requests or recidivates to displaying aloofness. When this happens, you might be in what I call the “Video Game Zone”.

In the Video Game Zone, you have exchanged so many lifeless communiqués with a woman that she has come to frame you as simply a “sounding board” or a “pen pal.” She may use your constant onslaught of praise-ridden emails to simply guild her ego, or you may just be someone to email when she’s bored.

In any case, if you find yourself exchanging too many cutesy emails that don’t seem to be going anywhere, then be warned, this probably means she doesn’t really view you as a real person. A similar phenomenon occurs in nightclubs. As Jeffy of Real Social Dynamics states:

“A club is a very dissociated environment…Nothing is real in the club. Lots of times these chicks…don’t see you as a human being. They just see you as some blank cipher… some random dude…You have to become a real person to them, because now you’re just a video game…” – Jeffy of Real Social Dynamics