Me: After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that everyone in this airport sucks except me. Tell your friends.
Her: Who is this?

So far so good

Me: You deleted me! It must have been the months of zero contact.
Her: No, I got a new phone. Lost all my numbers.

You’re emotionally reaching here, and qualifying the situation for her. It would be been better to accuse/tease her

i.e. “You lost my number? That’s it… we’re in a big fight”

Me: New phone = old phone broke when beating other girl up with your fists of fury. (fists of fury – callback humor)
Her: Huh? How did you know about that? Who is this? Hello? How did you know that I beat someone up?

Good

Me: Oh, come on. You should remember now with that reference! And you told me.
Her: I haven’t told anyone about hitting the other girl and I don’t know who this is, so I couldn’t have told you. (Aside: turns out she hit some girl last week; whereas, I was referring to an incident back when we did hang out – an unfortunate coincidence).

You’re emotionally reaching again, can you hear it? It’s the subtext of “common’, like me, I’m cool… please..?”

Me: That’s not good, Emily. We hung out a few times last summer. I worked for the court and you were on jury duty.
Her: Hahahahah! Omg. Now I get the “fists of fury” reference. Yeah, I got myself in trouble.

That’s fine

Me: Ha yes! I was hoping you would catch that reference, Almost worked.
Her: How are you? Lol.

Again, emotionally reaching. you even said it yourself, you were seeking a response/reaction. it’s bad enough when it’s subcommunicated, but in this case, you’re calling yourself out too.

Me: Oh, I’m just fine. Waiting to catch my delayed flight. How was your day? Do anything spectacular like save the planet or stop world hunger?
Her: My da…eh, it wasn’t the best. I did save a puppy from getting hit by a car. I’ve had a rough month and a half.

I like this text. It’s a good mix of normal rapport, with a little bit of fun. That doesn’t go to say that that’s the perfect formula for all texts. Rather, in this instance, this is good. The blanket rule you would use for all texts is to have a push/pull structure as much as you can.

Me: Yeah, take it day by day and it gets better eventually. Like you saved “rover” today. Nicely done. Are you still educating America’s children?

This ones alright too. I wouldn’t have stacked another question at the end (had a question in your last one). Instead I would have replaced that with some statement. I would also avoid giving cliche pieces of advice….

i.e. “Bad days suck… let alone bad months. You actually saved a puppy? That’s cute.”

Her: Well…I was living with my boyfriend for 8 months until I found out he was cheating on me. Lost him, my dog, my home, my job. Hit the girl he was cheating on me with. Moved back to parents’ house about a week ago. So I’m looking for a job.

Me: I’m sure you’ll find work. Busy right now?

This one is miscalibrated. I honestly think this is the turning point where you begin to lose it (not in the text farther below, like you initially pointed out). She opened up for a bit, and you responded with some generic advice and then seemingly pushed for a meet-up. I would sympathize with the severity of her problem (but not in a needy way), and then bridge to something lighter.

i.e. “Ouch. Sorry to hear… and I thought 2011 was kickin my ass. Solution: Keep saving puppies on a daily basis and things will have to turn around. Or we could ditch town to Tahiti.”

Her: I am in teh middle of having dinner with my family.

Me: You text during family dinner! I guess I’ll talk to this crazy old lady who’s dressed like an expensive hooker. I don’t know whether I should laugh or cringe.

The part with ‘I guess…’ is emotionally reaching. But aside from that, this is the exact inflection point I was talking about in my previous post where the smart one-liners are stretched a little too far. This might have been funny 6 texts ago, but now it seems like you just ran out of things so you reverted back to what worked in the past. You don’t want to come off as a one trick pony.

Her: Sorry. Nooo, I was texting before we sat down to eat.

She may be giving in a little and being nice, but this is not the dynamic that feeds into strong sexual attraction. She wants someone who can bite back, and be playful from a place of strength

Me: This reminds me of our last convo. I think we texted back and forth for three hours. Madness!
Her: Haha

Things start to spiral down here. You’re really reaching here. It’s like when some guy is about to lose his girlfriend, and he starts spilling out all the memorible things they did together when times were better… She responds as expected, with one word.

Me: Emily, bail me out here! Angry travelers are threatening to mutiny if our flight does not leave soon.
Her: Huh?

And it goes back to pressing the one-trick button. Again, this might have been funny 10 texts ago, but it’s the same text again… just in different form. To be honest, I don’t really get the content either. At best, it seems like a joke that missed. This will get better with practice.

Me: (i made a joke about her fondness for Cold Play and inserted a joke about how they write songs about fake love). Where’s that likable personality?
Her:Thanks. Sorry I didn’t respond. My phone died so I put it up on the charger in my room.

She is verrry yellow, pretty much red. She’s not playful, she’s not giving much. You’re really on the fence here.

Me: I’m glad to hear that. For some reason, I thought you might react negatively to hearing from me again. (I FUCKED UP HERE WITH THAT UNNECESSARY STATEMENT)

Ouch. Yeah, this is really really emotionally reaching, in not even a playful way. But this isn’t the one text that tanked the chain, she has been gradually getting more and more red.

Her: Ha, I would have called you if my phone didn’t die.

Me: We will chat later this week. This weather will determine whether I sleep on a cot in this airport or my bed tonight. Snowing by you? (she lives near me)
Her: Yea

Me: And I have to be in your “favorite” city tomorrow for this trial. Guess I’ll sleep when I’m dead!
her: Lol

She’s giving consistent one-word responses. At least with regards to texts, this girl is clearly red at the moment.

Me: Talk later. They are shoving us onto the plane.

Next day:
Traffic on snow covered roads makes mowing your lawn with scissors fun. I need a helicopter.

The real kicker here is that because you used that same kind of “teasing/attraction” texts above (the one-trick pony thing), when it came time for a situation where that would have worked great (i.e. a ping), it unfortunately gets wrapped in with the overuse. This would have been funny if there weren’t so many similar texts to this one throughout the chain.

End.

Okay, that really got into the details of it, which at times can focus too much on the “mechanics” of a good text, while masking the overall bigger themes that are going on. So here are the themes:

Emotional overreaching: At least via text, there’s a part of you that’s still reaching emotionally. The framework your texts are coming from when she doesn’t respond 100% your way are indicating that you have expected her to be acting towards you in a certain way. Rather, you need to get in the frame of mind where you are expecting absolutely nothing, but enjoying every good reaction that you get. Enjoy, don’t expect.

If you look at the critique above, you can see that you’re leaking in a variety of ways (pushing for humor, expecting behavior from her when it’s unwarranted, reaching for straws in hopes you catch onto something when she starts to lose interest, etc…). Like it or not, all this ties back to Inner Game. It’s okay though, like I said, I used to hate text messages for this very reason. My game would get solid numbers, but I’d burn those numbers to the ground by being a pussy/uncalibrated via text. It’s a natural learning curve (just like how most guys become too high-energy/dancing monkey when they’re first starting to learn attraction).

Keep focusing on the right things and you’ll grow out of it.

Normal, normal, spike, etc… – To paraphrase Braddock, normal – normal – spike – normal – normal – spike etc… is the formula for great game. This applies ever more so to text. Have more normal conversation, not every text needs to be a smart one-liner (in fact, this is bad). If you check out the phone and Text game book, it’s easy to confuse the text conversations Braddock is having for being a string of 15 funny one-liners. They’re not. The natural humor in his rapport just happens to be incredibly good, so even when he’s bantering about normal things, it is naturally juiced up with some really funny content. This is something you will get better with over time for sure. Guaranteed. Just keep texting a lot of girls.

Work on those two things. You’ll know you have those down when you can string text conversations that go on and on and on (i.e. when you get to the point where you are naturally delaying your texts because you just don’t care as much, and you stop caring whether or not she’ll respond). This in itself is good enough 90% of the time to push for a meet-up if you ran good game in person. After you get that down, then, and only then, can you start focusing more on adding the flashier elements like sexualizing, strong statements of intent, etc… (which, when done right, sets the best tone possible for a meet-up and serves as a catalyst to speed everything up).

As for what to do next with this girl. I would lay off the horn for ~2 days. Ping with something that’s interesting, but not outrageously funny, try to spark up rapport, and then slowly work your way back to the point where you can push comfortably for a meet-up. I wouldn’t put too many eggs in this basket though, just write it off as a learning experience, and if anything actually comes out of it, view it as a bonus.

——————–

Last point: Please purge “HB” and “kino” from your vocabulary immediately. Thanks .

-AS