Short and Sweet

Ever have this experience where a girl you talk to for 15-20 (or more) minutes gives you a flaky number but a girl you speak to for 3 minutes texts you back and makes it on a date? I'll explain exactly why this happens, specifically for guys who open direct. I previously did an article about why direct approaching is absolutely wrong to use in day or night game and how it hurts your game by doing it. In this piece, I'm crediting direct with a little more usefulness and explaining the only situation conceivable where direct might help: very short interactions.

As I mentioned in my article about 3 reasons to never go direct, the way you start the interaction plays a huge role in how it unfolds over the long-term. An approach slightly more upbeat and energetic than the girl or girls you're opening is the best choice because it leaves room for the set to feel like it is getting better as time goes on. A direct approach is too far outside of the range of normality to be considered a slight bump up, it's way too strong. This means that as your set unfolds, you have to constantly one-up the energy and expectations of the opener which makes an impossible task. Even if the set is solid all the way through, it will feel like it's getting worse because you aren't maintaining and increasing those expectations. You have to continually outdo yourself to make it make sense.

With an indirect or neutral/situational opener, everything that comes after makes the interaction feel like it's moving forward and improving because of how low-effort and low expectation it was. So here's the caveat. If you can open direct, number close and leave within a small amount of time, you're almost hiding the downward slope in a way because you're leaving long before the interaction has a chance to take a dip, which means her memory of the interaction will remain more positive.

You don't want to give the interaction time to get worse, you want to leave on a high note. This is why many direct practitioners get more flakes than necessary: they start and run the set badly and take a number on a relatively low note. This explains why these same direct approachers experience flakes on long, drawn out sets but very tight, concise interactions with numbers at the end tend not to flake, barring the possibility that the interaction is too short for the girl to make heads or tails of. The 20 minute set got worse and he closed on a low note, the 3 minute interaction didn't have a chance to feel those effects and the girl kept her enthusiasm to see him again. It's not blind luck, it's knowing how what you're doing is affecting her experience of you.