Max Able

Phone Tag Part One: Getting the Number

April 24, 2010 at 1:02 am
By Max Able

A buddy of mine recently confided in me that he is confident meeting and flirting with new women, but he always psyches himself out when it comes to getting her number.

Unfortunately, a lot of guys build up getting a girl’s number as if it were medaling in an Olympic flirting event – only an elaborate series of flips, leaps and twists, climaxing in a flourish of charm and charisma, will get the digits. She might dig the performance, but the performance ain’t you, and the performance ain’t gonna last.

First, don’t go for the number unless you’ve demonstrated your attraction to a girl, either through physical or spoken flirtation, and she’s reciprocated. If you’re into her, announce it. If you come off vague or overly-platonic, she won’t leave with the excitement of anticipating your call, and you’re only postponing having to demonstrate interest later. Save your time and get to the point. If she’s feeling the same way, your forwardness is going to multiply her attraction to you. Read the rest of this entry »

Real Talk

April 12, 2010 at 5:00 pm
By Max Able

Like an iceberg that conceals 90% of its mass below the water, conversation is often full of underlying psychological motivations. Think about the small pings of pleasure you may take in demonstrating your superior knowledge of something to a peer, or when someone consolidates or sympathizes with your situation. Or, consider how many times a peer has blatantly steered a conversation of yours towards one of these ends, whether they’re the dominant, alpha-male type or insecure and needy. In fact, there’s a whole line of psychology – Transactional Analysis – that examines how this reward-motivated subtext actually characterizes a large portion of our dialogue.

Allowing such subtexts to pilot your interactions can be particularly detrimental in a relationship, where it’s easy to steer your behavior and conversation towards the rewards of love without being authentic to your partner or yourself.

Consider a guy on a first date who decides he wants to hookup with a girl. Instead of acting as himself, his comments and actions are oriented towards seduction, presenting an idealized, fantasy version of himself to her. If the performance wins the girl, it is not really him that she’s attracted to, but rather the invented personality.

How long can he hold up the act?

Or, as couple lays in bed, she tells him “I love you” for the first time. She says so not because it’s completely true — though she thinks she could love him — but because she wants him to love her back.

What happens when it turns out she isn’t able to love him?

The common thread in both of these scenarios is simple. Whoever has altered their behavior to gain the rewards of the relationship is acting dishonestly. Attempting to keep up false premises is a psychologically brutal path that will salt the soil of any relationship.

Acting honestly, and even evaluating your own thoughts and feelings enough to reach the degree of self-certainty necessary to do so, can be a constant and amorphous task. To behave, act and think in ways that conflict with our ideologies, especially when removed by time, is utterly human. But through scrutiny and self-awareness we can hope to act as honestly as possible, and to catch and prevent ourselves from manipulating our behavior towards the cheap reward.

Relax, refrain, and let the authentic reward come to you. It will be infinitely more valuable.

The Myth of Love at First Sight

March 2, 2010 at 10:41 am
By Max Able

I believe in attraction at first sight. I believe in like, and in lust, at first sight. But do I believe in love at first sight?

Nope. Here’s why.

Like life, there’s really no accurate definition of love. It’s a level of feeling you have towards another person, but only you are going to identify it by measuring your emotions. If humans were more like dashboards, we might have a meter on hearts that blink red when we’re in love, but alas, we do not. We are responsible for our own definitions of love.

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Boost Your Sex Appeal

February 8, 2010 at 5:00 pm
By Max Able

Women always ask me what they can do to get a guy’s attention. They think men are solely focused on physicality, which isn’t true. Nothing deflates my interest more than a girl who goes out of her way to get physical attention. Women who think that pounds of makeup, excessively revealing clothing and desperate ploys for attention will help them snag a man are getting it completely wrong. Girls like that, I leave to the meatheads.

Real allure comes from personality, and there are many ways a woman’s personality can be manifested physically to maximize sex appeal. Chances are you just need to accentuate something you’ve already got going. Here are seven turn-on tips:

1. Own Your Inner Nerd – Were you raised on Super Mario? Do you tear up when Gandalf fell off the bridge of Khazad-Dum? If you’ve got a nerdy side, own it. Most guys went through nerdy phases growing up when girls were too terrifying to talk to. Hearing an adult woman quote Han Solo will drive these men crazy.

2. Ride Your Bike – A girl on a bike tells a guy she’s tough, independent and isn’t afraid to bump shoulders with a car on her commute. I swear that any degree of attraction is multiplied by 10 if the girl is on a bike. Not to mention, it’s a lot more fun and easy to approach a girl on a bike than in her car.

3. Have a ‘Usual’ – When a girl won’t stop talking about how wasted she is after her two Cosmos, I get worried about what sort of turtle shell she needed those drinks to crawl out of. But a girl who can hold her liquor is a total turn-on. Classic drinks like a vodka martini, whisky straight, or a sidecar demonstrate a hidden sophistication that men will definitely want to get to know.

4. Read! – Intelligence is the sexiest thing of all, and nothing gets my attention like a girl buried in a novel. You don’t need to carry your copy of Lolita to the bar to make this happen. If a girl so much as tells me she spent an afternoon reading, I’m immediately drawn to her mind, which can be a much more erotic realm than the body.

5. Eye Contact – Hands-down the best way to manufacture sex appeal as a woman is to be sexually confident. The strongest physical manifestation of this is direct eye contact. Typically a male technique, whenever a girl’s used it on me, I’ve practically had to roll my tongue back into my mouth. It takes a bit of nerve to pull off, but when a girl I’ve just met throws me into a staring contest and won’t take her eyes away, she pretty much has me on a leash.

6. Get Your Grub On – All guys I know like a girl who can eat. It doesn’t have to be gluttonous or unhealthy, but there is something primitively satisfying in a seeing a girl enjoy eating. Conversely, going out with someone whose main dinner activity is pushing their salad around with a fork is a big turn-off.

7. Smile - This one sounds obvious, but it’s not. Smiling at someone you’re into is flirting 101. But smiling to yourself, laughing at something that’s in your head, or just looking glad to be alive is extremely enticing. When I walk into a crowded cafe or party, the first girl I notice is the one who’s smiling. Not only does it make you more easily approachable, but it’s a sign that you can put that smile on his face, too.

The Truth About Lies

January 19, 2010 at 5:00 pm
By Max Able

There’s a line in any relationship between things that are unnecessary to disclose to your partner and the small transgressions that just feel easier to keep hidden.

Errant sexual fantasies about other people or doubts about the relationship that you haven’t yet resolved are best kept private unless they materialize they into a real issue that you can address to your partner.

Then there are thoughts and behaviors that require transparency, but simply become easier to conceal because ‘making them into an issue’ would blow things out of proportion. Maybe you get back in touch with an ex in a platonic way, or conceal from your partner that you once had a relationship — or a fling — with a friend. Perhaps you have a habit — smoking, gambling, going to strip clubs — that you find harmless to keep in the dark, because you can handle it, and what your partner doesn’t know can’t hurt them.

Perhaps you’ve managed to convince yourself that you’re protecting your partner by keeping these secrets from them.

But when you behave this way, you’ve entered dangerous territory, and it won’t be long before the accumulation and maintenance of your lies begins to threaten the relationship. Lying to your partner becomes your primary mental activity — measuring your transgressions, keeping them out of your partner’s sight, and speculating about whether or not your partner knows becomes your principal form of mental participation in the relationship.

You must also constantly self-debate whether the things you are hiding are small enough to keep hidden of if they’ve gotten out of control. You will enter the realm of self-deception, where you wind up assuring yourself that something you really aren’t comfortable with is okay. Self-deception is the most dangerous path of all, as it erodes your trust in yourself and begins to cast doubt on everything you find meaning in or enjoy — particularly towards the relationship itself.

Keeping secrets will poison you from the inside. Even if the relationship is good, your time together is asterisked by your lying, and the asterisks will grow to overshadow the story of your happiness with your partner.

It takes a tremendous amount of discipline to be honest with your partner. Heck, it takes a lot of discipline to be honest to yourself. But if you aren’t willing to maintain your integrity and either refrain from or disclose your less-than-flattering behaviors, your relationship is going to fall ill under the strain, and sick things can die.

Hard To Get or Hard Headed?

January 2, 2010 at 12:14 pm
By Max Able

Here’s a question I was recently asked by a friend whose attempts to diffuse a guy’s interest only seemed to encourage his approaches:

Why do some men seem to thrive on rejection and fight harder for the affection of the one who spurned them?

The pursuit of women can bring out the worst in men, and this will be all too familiar to someone who’s had to beat off a guy who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He still calls after you demonstrate disinterest, or even after refusing him flat-out. He’s insistent on becoming friends, but doesn’t stop the pressure to flirt. And if you call him on it he gets self-defensive.

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Ask Max

December 6, 2009 at 12:02 am
By Max Able

Sad guy In Ask Max, our guide to the male mind in all matters of dating and relationships, Max Able fields reader questions. If you’d like to ask Max yourself, email your question to Max at maximusable@gmail.com

Recently, reader Micheal submitted this impassioned comment on our Stop Worrying. Love Yourself blog piece. Michael finds himself emotionally reeling from a relationship with ‘the one’ that ended three years ago. “I continue to work on me and keep my side of the street clean, but it just doesn’t seem like I will ever be able to love again or love another,” Michael writes. “I feel like I will love her forever. I love her no less than I did 3 years ago. She still haunts my dreams and my waking days and nights.”

Michael -

It’s okay to love the wrong person.

You can be so in love with the wrong person that no one, in your imagination, will ever exceed them. You can be so in love with the wrong person that their loss makes you see the rest of your life as a slump. In fact, you can be so in love with the wrong person that you forgive what makes them wrong, and you can incur a tremendous amount of pain doing it.

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