I was talking recently with a student who’s on my Telegram Support program about date flakes and ended up revisiting my texting guide. I thought I would post a sample chapter as it would be a nice way to get a post out this week without much effort since I’m travelling, while still shilling my products and hopefully giving some help to you guys at the same time.
You can find “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid. Vol 2: A Beginner’s Guide To Texting” here.
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DEALING WITH DATE FLAKES
Date flakes can be one of those frustrating parts of the process and you should be ready to deal with them in a mature and non-reactive way. These are perhaps the best moments to improve your Inner Game and show yourself the kind of man you want to become.
It’s important to learn to see when a girl starts to flake, because it doesn’t simply happen when she messages to say she can’t make it anymore. It typically starts a few hours or even days beforehand. Perhaps her response time is slowing down, indicating that her interest for you is diminishing. Or maybe on the day itself she starts to try and downgrade the romantic nature of the date or to move the meeting location; maybe she’s trying to make the date so convenient for her – and not for you – that eventually you flake on her. At a high level, you can sense that a girl is going to flake because her level of compliance diminishes in the run up to the date.
Once you receive her proper date flake, “I can’t come anymore,” message, you should, first of all, try to judge whether her flake was made in good or bad faith. Is she sending it just before the date is meant to start or with a very weak explanation for why she can’t come? This suggests she’s acting in bad faith and is now trying to dodge your scheduled meet-up for something else, or that she simply doesn’t want to meet you anymore. Bad faith date flakes are typically telegraphed by diminishing compliance in the run-up to the date.
If you believe that she is acting in bad faith then simply say “Okay. No worries” and leave it at that.
It’s likely that she is now a dead lead but you can, if you like, roll off for a few days before re-engaging again following the steps from Period 2 onward just as if she’d given an amber or red light to your date request. This is just in case you’ve misjudged her intentions and/or she’s suddenly flipped into a horny part of her cycle. However, it’s highly likely that your gut instinct is correct and that she flaked in bad faith and therefore is not worth pursuing (do not pursue dead leads).
On the other hand, does she send a flake message many hours in advance (or even days), with a genuine reason, apologising multiple times and using emojis? She may even immediately be offering an alternative day to meet which you’re free to accept. In this case, the flake is most likely genuine and she does want to meet you again. If you believe she is acting in good faith then you can put more warmth into your response:
“Okay. No worries. Another time 👍🏻”
If she says she’s ill you could tack “Get well soon” onto the end of the message as well.
If in this case she goes on and reiterates her apology then you should engage with her shortly and can practically confirm that she’s acting in good faith and does want to meet. You can then roll off for a day and re-engage using the instructions from Period 2 of the texting guide onward.
When it comes to roll-off length I suggest a one day roll off because she’s still acting in good faith. In the bad faith case I suggested rolling off for a few days which would give you more chance of re-engaging in a horny part of her cycle or where her other options have fallen off the hook. If the flake happens days in advance then you should wait for the day after the date would have occurred to re-engage.
In both cases you’re trying to show her that her flaking is water off a duck’s back, and this is where the Inner Game lessons come in especially. This is not an occasion to try and “fix” the girl and launch into a tirade on manners and etiquette, even if she has been rude. You may think that that will be a moment of catharsis in letting your anger out but a) it won’t let any anger out and instead primes you for future anger i.e. reactivity, and b) you’re not going to change her behaviour anyway.
Don’t let the internet keyboard warriors convince you otherwise. They might get a lot of likes on their tweets where they “tell the girl off” but it’s simply an echo chamber of angry men. And I don’t mean that in a “the manosphere is a place for misogynists” way. These are genuinely angry, reactive and insecure men who won’t accept the truth of female emotional driven behaviour; behaviour which can change very quickly. This can even be the case with men who have had a lot of sex in their life; just because a guy has been with a lot of women doesn’t mean he has good Inner Game. The demons are still there and he won’t find long term happiness unless he deals with them.
If you react angrily to her flake – or to any of her behaviour for that matter – you’re only showing her that you’re a little boy who’s throwing his toys out of the pram when he didn’t get what he wanted. As I’ve said multiple times in this guide: you want to cultivate the identity of a masculine man with high self-esteem. A man like that knows the value of his attention and so knows that the girl is missing out when he removes it from her.
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If you enjoyed that snippet then here’s the link again to the book.
Yours unfaithfully,
Thomas Crown
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