Dating

January 8th, 2013

The Father Of Relationship Game Shares His Secrets

Long before PUA became mainstream, Thomas Hodges wrote The System: The Dating Dictionary, a manual advocating specific strategies for securing long-term relationships with the ever feisty American woman. The System has a ton of valuable advice, but it is sold at an unreasonable $100 per copy, and so much of the wisdom contained within is unavailable to the average man. With the down economy, and the modern flood of dating products, most men aren’t going to pony up $100 for advice that can be found online if one searches hard enough. $100 dollar products look like scams.

The book is particularly notable for being the first of its kind. Not only does it have a strict game plan for men to follow, but it also was written by a man for men with the intention of keeping a good woman in a happy relationship. Prior to Doc Love, most relationship focused material was written by women, and therefore had no bearing to reality, or was just about scoring sex (e.g. Ross Jefferies). Doc Love tapped into this unexplored niche first and probably has profited the most from it, having been a regular columnist at Askmen for a decade, as well as hosting radio programs and seminars for men.

Thus the goal of this review is to give away the most valuable parts of the 300+ page book for free. As an experienced player I know the good parts of The System from the bad. We’ll talk about why Doc Love advocates some of the crazy advice that he does, and what parts men should follow.

I. Interest Levels

When a woman meets a man, she is either interested in him or not. A man can only raise her initial interest level provided she has a high enough attraction to him. Doc Love rates a woman’s interest level on a scale of 0-100%, with 0% being totally indifferent and 100% being so madly in love she would take a bullet for you.

A woman needs an interest level of 50% or higher before she can be gamed. Thus her initial impression of you is based on your passive game, and only afterward can you actively work to get inside of her pants. Ideally you want to game women who have high initial interest in you, so there is less work.

II. What Raises Her Interest Level?

The three most attractive personality traits any man can have are confidence, control, and challenge.

Confidence: Composed of self-esteem and self-confidence. Self-esteem involves standing up for yourself when being disrespected, and saying “No” to any behavior you find unacceptable. Self-confidence is believing in the principles of The System and not backing down from Doc Love’s game plan. I would also add into self-confidence is knowing when to be sexual with a woman.

Control: Composed of self-control, patience, and discipline. Self-control means to have mastery of your own emotions, and never letting a woman get under your skin. Patience means to move slowly with women; never rush into relationships. Discipline means, again, sticking to The System.

Challenge: Letting the woman chase you. Avoiding being too needy of her attention. Doing the bare minimum to keep the relationship going, always being prepared to dump her if she goes for another man or disrespects you.

According to Doc Love, only if you display confidence, control, and challenge, will a woman’s Interest Level for a man raise over time.

III. What Is Doc Love’s Game?

The entirety of Doc Love’s game plan is to separate women who aren’t interested in you from women who are. The strategy is to process a large volume of women and let The System sort the crappy relationship prospects from “Ms. Right.”

Doc Love is also a big proponent of doing cold approaches in this quest, but he understands the success rate for cold approaches is low. Nonetheless, no matter the social setting, Doc Love’s gameplan is as follows:

1. Make the best damn first impression possible. Be a charmer, like Cary Grant, and be (or at least act as) the most distinguished gentleman in the world.

2. Get her number and bounce.

3. Call her up in 5-9 days after you get the number, but never on a weekend (except Sunday evenings). So if you score her number on a Wednesday, you would wait until next Monday to call her for a date (Challenge).

4. Never schedule dates for the weekend unless she specifically requests for it (Challenge).

5. Once on the date, do not touch her until she touches you (Challenge). Again, be the most interesting awesome man in the world. At the end of the date, provided she made a move on you first, you can go for the kiss.

6. Wait 5-9 days again to ask her for another date, unless she calls you up first to ask you out again (always respond positively to a woman’s advances).

7. Don’t worry about pushing for sex. It will be obvious when she wants it (she’ll ask to go to your house, she’ll invite you over hers, etc), and if sex happens it will occur sometime between dates 2 and 9 (Patience).

8. If at any time the woman stops responding to your calls, or turns down your sexual advances on a date, you dump her.

Obviously, this game plan is going to turn off a lot of woman, but that’s okay. In Doc Love’s world, this is just sorting out women who have a low Interest Level in you, while keeping the ones who actually like you. There’s no point in pursuing women with low interest in you, since even if you do manage to marry such a girl she’ll just divorce rape you anyways.

Additionally, The System guarantees that the only women who stick around with have the best personality traits possible for pleasing a man.

IV. What Personality Traits Do Men Look For In Women?

There are three personality traits a woman must have if a man wants to have a long, happy, and fulfilling relationship.

Flexible: Does she bitch, nag, and argue about pointless shit all the time? Or does she let the man do as he pleases, such as going out by himself, and pursuing his own interests and hobbies? Quite obviously a man needs the latter, so avoid the shrew.

Giving: Does she like money more than men? Does she make time in the day for her activities but none for yours? Does she offer to pay for anything? Does she make an effort to please you (such as cook)? A giving woman is a loving woman, there is no other substitute in having a good wife.

Integrity: Is she loyal to you before other men? Does she lie, or is she honest? Can you trust her? Would you form a business partnership with her? If your woman doesn’t have integrity, then she’ll never be a good wife. You’ll always have to second guess her motives and watch your back against possible betrayals.

The reason why Doc Love has men wait 5-9 days in between dates and approach relationships so slowly is to discover what kind of a woman she is before you get involved. If a woman lacks any of these three all-important qualities, then you should unload her. She isn’t good relationship material.

Also, no woman is perfect. She might be really good in two areas but slightly deficient in a third, so it’s ultimately up to each man to judge what he’ll put up with.

Should a man discover the perfect giving woman with integrity and flexibility, then you should treasure her because you’ve found something special. Which is to say, continue to have confidence, control, and be a challenge.

V. What Is The Ultimate Goal Of The System?

The goal of the The System is to maintain power over your woman. Not power as a master over his slave, but power as a man over a woman. Power is what makes a woman fall in love with a man, and keeps her in love. Power comes from three sources.

1. A woman’s beauty. The more beautiful she is, the more power she has over men.

2. A man’s passive value. His looks, money, fame, etc, all weigh in to give a man power.

3. Whoever is winning the relationship game. If the man is gaming his woman properly, her interest level in the man will be higher than the man’s interest level in the woman.

Note the implications in these statements.

Doc Love is very harsh on beautiful women – because of the disproportionate amount of power a beautiful woman has, the odds of having a good relationship with a beautiful woman is slim to none.

A man should also be working hard to increase his passive value at all times, because it’s the only chance he has if he wants to keep a relationship alive over the long term.

VI. Samseau’s Analysis And Recommendations

For something written back in the 90′s, I have a lot of respect for a system that basically treats women as expendable objects until you find Ms. Right. This is the right attitude for handling women. It’s also a reflection of Doc Love’s career background as a salesman – the only way to move product is by pushing a large volume of customers. The System can only work if you are approaching hundreds of women each year.

One of the biggest problems newbies have with The System is that they don’t believe it. They cannot imagine waiting a week before calling, or standing up to your woman to make her like you more. However, both my experience and my friends experiences have confirmed that The System is legit, and as time passed much of Doc Love’s wisdom became codified in popular game blogs.

But even though most of the good parts of Doc Love’s system are mainstream in game circles today, I still see most players unaware of looking for a giving woman with integrity and flexibility. Most guys just go for the hottest women they can get, which is obviously a terrible idea for relationships. My best relationship was with a woman who was only a 6, easily worse looking than 50% of the women I’ve banged, yet I enjoyed sleeping with her every night. She treated me like a king and I had no problem giving her my time and attention.

Not Everything That Doc Love Recommends Is Good

Doc Love said to go for a girl’s phone number, but this was before smart phones became ubiquitous. Phone numbers today are absolutely worthless, and have an astronomical flake rate. Dating in general is nothing like it was in the 90′s, and women today view dating as anti-challenge. A woman knows you like her if you ask her out, and so that can kill the seduction.

Doc Love advocated waiting on sex, but that’s not a good strategy. Since the goal of The System, in Doc Love’s words, is to increase your power over the woman, it doesn’t make sense to let her control access to sex. You want to get her sex card played as soon as possible, in order to decrease the amount of power she has over you. Waiting one, or even two dates, for sex is acceptable, but in my experience the longer a woman makes the man wait, the less interested she is in him.

Waiting on sex means you’ll miss on out a lot of flings since the only chance of banging most women (the ones who will never be your girlfriend) is if you move extremely fast. What man wants to go through long dry spells in search of Ms. Right? My preference is to get lots of easy sex in between girlfriends. Good relationship material seems to comes once every two years or so, and that’s provided you’re approaching hundreds of women each year. Waiting for up to two years with no sex doesn’t sound like a good system to me.

Not to mention when you finally do meet Ms. Right, all of that sexual experience will sure come in handy.

The best way to run challenge game today is to bang the woman on the first day you meet her, and then wait a week before you call her up again to hang. If she wants to see you again, she can call you up in the meantime. If you meet her and bang again, then you’ll want to wait another week (maybe two weeks even) to call her up again. You want to bait the woman into chasing you, so her interest level goes up.

The beauty of this plan is that if she loses interest in you, then you’re off the hook! You already got the bang and now you don’t have to deal with a woman of low relationship quality. It’s win-win.

Finally, as a general note, The System is poorly written and the entire game plan has to be pieced together from various sections of the book. There is no neat outline like the one provided in section III. Doc Love is not a writer, he’s a salesman. But a very clever one at that.

Follow @returnofkings

About the Author

Samseau is a player philosopher psychologist who enjoys a good discussion. His column runs every Tuesday. You can follow him on Twitter.

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http://realmikaelryan.blogspot.com Mikael

The problem with the 5-9 days is for what type of game you’re attempting. Roosh covers this in Bang where he states waiting is up to you on what you feel works for you and depending on what your end game is. While i’d say 5-9 days probably works great for dating, 5-9 days is not going to be good for adding a notch. 5-9 will state exactly what it is, but if shes not down for being a booty call you may have missed your shot. And as Roosh has said, never assume you’ll get a second chance.
Uncle Elmer

Another classic from the golden era of nascent men’s advice was R.Don Steele’s “How to Date Young Women for Men Over 35, Volumes I and II”. And even as far back as the early 70′s you could buy “How to Pick Up Chicks” from the back pages of Penthouse, Hustler, and other long-gone men’s interest periodicals.
Tampa

I have personally instituted his “no touch” policy on the first few dates. I have tried a zillion modified versions of this policy where i touch them, where i touch them a lot, where i dont’ touch them at all, where i try to kiss them where i dont’ kiss them etc….. and his policy of no touch is GOLDEN. I know the manosphere screams try to get the lay quick but in a dating format I have much more success by laying back and waiting. I get skewered on blogs about this, but i have tried all the methods and my close rate has to be over 80% when i stay patient and employ active disinterest. It really is shocking how well it works. I think it’s mostly do to the fact that guys can’t keep their hands off girls so when you don’t touch them, they are a little taken back by it.
- Stuki Moi
  
  My personal experience is similar, but I do think it depends on your personality. Highly extroverted guys can get away with touching without coming across as needy. One thing I have noticed seems to work, is “inadvertent”, even clumsy, touches; that doesn’t really seem intended. But that probably because my natural approach to people is acting Clark Kent; Superman camouflaged as a bit of a nerd; or someone with so much important stuff going on that nothing in the here and now is able to command more than my half interested attention. As always, I suspect congruency is king.
- doug
  
  I agree with this. I definitely show active disinterest once I get on the date and let myself warm up to the girl naturally (if she deserves it). This seems to be working as I have closed almost 100% (all but one, a S. Korean of course) of the girls that I get out on a date, usually on the first date and sometimes on the second or third.
- Samseau
  
  I employ the “no touch” rule as much as possible, but once I get her to a sex location then I go for the close.
external

I would do the one by the toilet. Kidding. Serious.

One can argue: “yeah, but we can do the same pictorial showing the degeneration of modern American men.” And I would answer:

1) Writers and commenters in the manosphere routinely criticize all facets of modern American men.
2) American men are endlessly bashed in the mainstream, while women get a free pass, because even the most mildly unflattering assessment of women is “misogynist” and “sexist.”

So your post is bringing balance.
external

^^^ that comment was meant for the decline of American women post.
taterearl

The System was one of the first legit relationship books I bought and many of the principles I didn’t understand fully until I found the manosphere.

His no gifts until they make 9 dates and only have that gift be a red rose is a good one…and the less money you spend the better.

And his book was one of the first I red where feminism gets righteously destroyed.
taterearl

The one downside I found was that he asked and interrogated women about what they like in a guy. Which we know is something they don’t have a clue about. I think he probably found more info by watching the naturals he talked about in his book.
moses

I bought “The System” in 2000 or 2001. Doc’s simple rules were easy to follow. His “interest level” metaphor was gold — a woman either likes you or she doesn’t. If she doesn’t, next her immediately. He also brought immense clarity with his reality principle — a woman with a high interest level doesn’t cancel dates or go out with ex boyfriends. Next her.

And his emphasis on finding flexible and giving women was completely golden.

Great intro red pill material which saved me a lot of time with low-quality or uninterested women.
http://dannyfrom504.wordpress.com dannyfrom504

i remember this guy from askmen.com. i think it was VERY apropos for the early 2000.

overall good stuff, but i think it needs to be tweaked for the current SMP. it’s no longer dating for women 18-24/25. it’s all texts and “hanging out” until you close her. you hook up a few times and she either decides she’s into you or not. at least i’m speaking for the girls down south.

it’s not uncommon to meet a girl 22 years old and she’s got a 3 year old kid. THOSE girls want to date.
no thanks.
- http://augustspoos.wordpress.com/ Spoos in August
  
  Yeah… It’s definitely casual sex until she decides whether or not she likes you. Guys who assume they’ve met their next girlfriend after every lay are not going to have long-term relationships. Even if you’re “dating” her, she has to really want it (drunken, tearful pleading to be more than a hookup).
Ramjet

Doc Love, man, I remember first reading his articles on Askmen back in 2005. I still read his book every couple of months to keep myself on track.
Onder

Yeah i agree. Waiting for sex thing is only going to make a girl lose interest and become more flaky.
Whenever i waited on a girl who i thought was different from the rest. She would always prove to me otherwise. They are all the same.

Bang on the first date. If no bang occurs. Cut the leash and let her go.
michelin

excellent advice, Samseau. I’m impressed.
Nomad77

One point to make here. Doc Love never wrote a book. He wrote what he called a Dating Dictionary and that is exactly what it is. With what the OP has outlined here you don’t need to buy the book. You can get most of the other information from just reading his articles on askmen.com.
Nomad77

Disinterest definitely works on American girls, not so much on non-Americans.
- http://dannyfrom504.wordpress.com dannyfrom504
  
  i prefer spanish speaking women.
  
  if you don’t make a move, she won’t. they LOVE a man to take charge. and they aren’t any crazier than other women, they’re actually VERY predictible.
Andy

Best book on long term relationships ever written. Enough said!