Good Faith Game: Shit Tests, Timewasters and LMR (How Our Metaphors Come Back to Bite Us)

Recently I put out a couple of podcasts: one on shit tests and one on No girls (links here and here respectively). Today I want to talk about how the metaphors we use can come back to bite us and can be harmful to our Inner Game, specifically by looking at the terms shit tests, timewasters and LMR.

This post is the continuation of a series of posts I’ve been writing on “Good Faith Game”, which can be found here, here and here. They are a series of posts in which I hope to describe my mindset, how to take the grind out of Daygame and how to make it more enjoyable while operating from a position of integrity and honesty.

I’d also like to link to an old post of mine on a book called Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson (link here). I recommend reading that post before continuing to read this one.

Filling in the Blanks

By using certain metaphors to describe things we “fill in the blanks:” the literal words of the metaphor shape the meaning that we interpret. Shit test is a term often used to describe any kind of objection that a girl brings up during a seduction or else when she’s being generally non-compliant such as when she says she has a boyfriend, can’t meet us this week or asks whether we “do this all the time.” The problem occurs when our brains try to fill in the blanks: when we talk about it under the guise of her “giving us shit” then it can make her come off as a nasty person who wants to mess with us. Similarly, if a girl is a timewaster then we get the image of someone who is maliciously tooling us for attention and resources and has no intention of progressing things. Lastly, LMR – last minute resistance – makes it seem as if we’re trying to take something from her against her will: she’s “resisting” us.

I hope it’s easy to see that these are negative connotations which we want to move away from. Terms like these can damage our view of women and lead us to assume that they come from a default position of bad faith. It is understandable that some guys have this view, though, given how someone’s history with women shapes how they view them today. Some, or possibly a majority, of guys getting into the seduction community will have had a lack of positive experiences with women and so it makes sense that this negative view will appeal to them. I remember how in one of Bodi’s books he quips that it was easy for Steve Jabba to “just love women” when they had only ever given him positive reactions in life.

Accuracy

To be honest, I wouldn’t have an issue with these terms if they were, on the whole, accurate, but they aren’t. Plus, holding the view that women are malicious actors is detrimental to our future success with them. To be clear, I don’t personally want you to just “believe all women:” to be naive and see them all as angels, but I think and find that it’s more accurate and beneficial to start from a default assumption of good faith: innocent until proven guilty, after all. I know that can be a really difficult step for some guys to take because of their distrust towards women – plus the fact that a lot of Red Pill information you’ll find on the net describes the worst things women can do* – but this is a genuinely helpful step to take and lets us move Daygame towards a near-pure positive experience.

* This is a psychological bias: to wrongly prioritise the strength of information over the weight i.e. it’s statistical probability. For example, people are more scared of shark attacks at Australian beaches (the high strength event) than being drowned (the weightier, much more probable event). Similarly, guys are liable to believe that all women are going to do the worst things to them rather than be likely to act like the average woman. Overall, The Red Pill gives you warnings, not promises.

Let’s look at the accuracy of the terms: shit test, timewaster and LMR. I’ve found through my own Daygame – and it’s been corroborated by my wings – that 99% of the time when a girl gives what would be considered a shit test it’s either a polite rejection or it’s just some banter and she’s joking around. You can think back to your own experiences and how when a girl mentioned a boyfriend, was in a rush or “not dating anyone right now” that forcing a number close mostly led to nothing. I’m not saying that these things can’t just be brainfarts, but they’re definitely not her “giving you shit” in the vast majority of cases.

Please remember, though, that I’m not saying “always take a woman at face value.” In the podcast on shit tests I give ways to try and push forward when she says these things but only when your calibration tells you that she’s interested enough for it to be worth it.

With timewasters we need to accept this one important facet of male-female relations: it is the man’s job to find out the woman’s agenda for him: is she after a ONS, a casual relationship, a boyfriend, a husband, etc? It is his responsibility to find this out and not her responsibility to overtly tell him. This is part of his masculine role and it is not part of the feminine role. However, she will send out signals to show this and he needs to take the hint.

The man must take responsibility throughout the seduction for the costs he incurs: if he spends ten minutes talking to a girl who told him in the first 30 seconds that she had a boyfriend then he can’t complain that she’s wasting his time; if a guy messages a girl for a week when she was always dragging her feet as to meeting up then he can’t complain that she’s wasting his time; if a guy goes on a date(s) with a girl where there’s an agenda mismatch – and his calibration isn’t telling him that she can be temporarily flipped to want the same thing as him – then he can’t complain that she’s wasting his time.

It’s true, a man must incur some kind of cost to find out where the girl stands, whether that’s time talking, messaging or dating her, but once he gets the information then he needs to act decisively. That’s why I’ve been saying recently that “she’s not a timewaster, he’s just wasting his own time.” And then if you decide to stay in the interaction, messaging her or dating her because you believe you can turn things around then at least you know she’s not tooling you.

LMR is a harder one to come to terms with because as a beginner/lower intermediate your escalation and calibration will be off, leading you to pull girls home before they’re ready or under false pretences i.e. you didn’t show enough intent and in the right way. That leads to situations where a girl might like to sleep with you but it’s all been too fast for her and so it leads to the hindbrain-forebrain conflict and “to and fro” scenarios. But as your calibration improves the amount of “to and fro” you’ll get will be way lower and all you need to be is patient and non-reactive. You’re simply giving her the chance to avoid feeling like everything happened “too fast” and for her to feel that she made you wait for a sufficient amount of time (even though that might only be ten to fifteen minutes).

By not seeing it as her resisting you and instead seeing it as just an opportunity to bring her to the precipice and give her the time and space to take the jump you’ll be a lot more successful. These days the only times where I do now get that “to and fro” is when I’m forced to try and pull way quicker than I would have liked due to transience. Even then, I don’t think of it as “resistance;” I think of it as me presenting the opportunity to her in the best way possible and then seeing whether she’ll take that leap.

And like I said, I don’t think all women are angels. Eventually you are going to come across girls who are maliciously “giving you shit” – being nasty or else disrespecting you – those who are literally tooling you for attention and drinks or those who come back to your place just to tease you. These are the occasions where the negative blank-filling of these terms are accurate. Perhaps this is a controversial thing to say but I don’t think those women are fully sane and that you should stay away from them. I say “sane” in the sense that there is a behaviour set that is normal and healthy and what they’re doing is not it. Once you identify these behaviours then you should be grateful because she just gave you an opportunity to practise your standards and move on from her.

And I don’t think you should work from a “but I just want to have sex with them so it doesn’t matter” mindset either because in trying to notch these girls you’ll just make yourself like them: another cog in the play-or-be-played low self-esteem, deeply unhappy machine. Add to that the fact that you’re unlikely to have sex with them anyway because in doing so they’re showing you that they don’t respect you.

Furthermore, the tactics you’ll see online to try and crack these kinds of women probably won’t sit right with you and in doing them you’ll come across as incongruent; they really only fit for guys who themselves have a malicious, machiavellian streak. Eventually, yes, you might lay one of them, but it’s like the broken clock being right twice a day.

Alternatives

Bringing this back to metaphors and the terms I think we ought to use: when it comes to shit tests I give a few examples in the podcast of what beginners are trained to say and then my recommendations as to what I think you should do which respects her plausible deniability, has the right vibe and levels of empathy and doesn’t degrade yourself as a man. I would call these “bumps in the road, if I still thought that the road was worth driving on.” So from now on they’re not shit tests they’re just “bumps in the road” (or any other way of describing it that you like). In the cases where it’s banter then treat it like banter: she’s having fun with you, not playing you. When it comes to timewasters I would look at how I could have taken more responsibility and how I got myself into a situation I didn’t want to be in. With getting a girl back home to mine my aim is to be patient and non-reactive and if I don’t see sufficient progress over a certain amount of time and certain level of horniness from her then I draw the line there and let her go: she wasn’t ready to take the jump tonight.

The power, in each case, comes from not using the terms anymore. We don’t have the ability to stop ourselves from thinking things in the short term but we sure as hell can control what comes out of our mouths. This, over time, through a process of auto-suggestion, will help us to take on a more accurate and beneficial view of the world.

Fake It ‘Til You Make It

Before I finish, I want to talk a little bit about “fake it ‘til you make it.” I’ve been a proponent of this phrase in the past but it flies in the face of this post and I really do stand by what I’ve written here and want to be consistent. When I would say “fake it ‘til you make it” then I was talking about imitating the behaviour of someone who’s high value so as to temporarily take on some of their aura, get a little bit more success with women and so build positive reference experiences. Or else by “faking it” you give yourself permission to be confident and try something you wouldn’t and the girl can see it’s not the real you but likes you anyway. However, there are all those negative connotations that come along with the word “fake.” I was never recommending anyone lie wholesale about themselves but instead that they’re trying to get an incremental advantage which lets them develop in the long run into who they want to be. I think this is what the vast majority of people think when they hear this phrase.

As people have pointed out before, it’s a shame that “fake” rhymes with “make,” hence the saying. It’s also quite pithy and stands out because we all know that a counterfeit version of something isn’t as good as the real thing; by allying yourself with the phrase it makes you stand out as a contrarian and I think a lot of people in this community enjoy living under a siege mentality. It might justify their belief that the world is out to get them.

It would be a lot nicer, metaphorically, to say “learn it ‘til you earn it” or “show it ‘til you grow it.” At the end of the day, those two suggestions plus the original all point towards the same thing in spirit – and I think that most people agree on that – but the connotations are different, and so I’m willing to stop saying “fake it ‘til you make it.”

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown

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2 thoughts on “Good Faith Game: Shit Tests, Timewasters and LMR (How Our Metaphors Come Back to Bite Us)

  1. >With timewasters we need to accept this one important facet of male-female relations: it is the man’s job to find out the woman’s agenda for him: is she after a ONS, a casual relationship, a boyfriend, a husband, etc?

    >and his calibration isn’t telling him that she can be temporarily flipped to want the same thing as him – then he can’t complain that she’s wasting his time.

    I do believe this is one of my sticking points. Looking forward to a coaching call on the subject. I’ll reach out with my schedule soon.

    >“show it ‘til you grow it.”
    All 3 inches in it’s full flory, never hide it.

    Like

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