I’m cheating on my post a little today… here’s me from the comments section of Sdaedalus regarding Skittling with a little more added on. The orginal concept of Skittles is Roissy’s and both posts are worth a read. The Cliff Notes summary being…
Skittling: “shorthand for giving a gift of low monetary value. The theory is that giving a low quality gift will make the woman more attracted than the same man in the same circumstances giving a high monetary value gift. So the theory goes that all things being equal, treating a woman relatively poorly with gifts will make her love you more.”
The advantage of a globally unique name is that I can just set up a Google Alert on my name and my lamp gets rubbed. So Sdaedalus pages me with…
“like most PUA advice, the role of skittling in long-term relationships has not been tested, and must be up for debate [paging Athol Kay here].
As to my answer to Skittling – not actually tried that with Jennifer I don’t think. All our money is pooled in a joint account and we’ve largely earned the same amount over the last 15 years to the point where we don’t keep count. If I buy her Skittles its with half her money anyway. So it’s all a moot point. Upon occasion I’ve snuck a Reese’s Pieces into the shopping cart because they’re her favorite. But then I’m edgy like that, you never know what might happen. I’m like a shopping cart ninja or something.
So she expands…
“There’s an argument that buying a girl a present with her own money (or part thereof) is uber-skittling.
I had this discussion with Maurice already on the previous thread where he suggested that as a present from him to me I should buy myself a pack of Skittles.
On a more serious note, although skittling in the monetary sense clearly doesn’t work with shared finances (though a true skittler would presumably avoid this for this reason), would you see skittling in the sense of treating a woman relatively poorly from time to time (not just with gifts, but generally) as a part of LTRs?”
Well in that case I am an uber Skittler as occasionally I just take some of the money half of which is Jennifer’s and buy porn with it. I guess that’s the ultimate Skittle. She buys romance novels and has some sort of ponzi scheme of paperback trading she does with other romance novel readers. It seems even enough I guess… we’re having sex a lot so I’m not trying to fix what isn’t broken. Though I am a little worried that if the ponzi scheme pays off we’re going to have to deal with 64,000 copies of used romance novels delivered over the next month. Though admittedly I’m not really paying attention to exactly how the paperback swap works. I just plan to deny all knowledge of it if she’s arrested.
Anyway…
As to treating women poorly as a LTR Game tactic this is exactly where PUAs shoot themselves squarely in the foot. There is a fundamental misunderstanding that the Beta comfort building skills are the opposite to the Alpha attraction building skills. They believe by purposely ruining the Beta stuff that they magically improve the Alpha stuff – it doesn’t. They might gain a small amount of Alpha credit for the balls to screw her over, but they damage a large amount of the comfort she has in the relationship. If they keep it up, she leaves in frustration.
Alpha and Beta traits are two completely different skill sets. You can get away with Alpha only in a pick up, but you clearly need both skill sets in a LTR.
I will lead (Alpha) a relationship in which I will be very nice to you (Beta), but if you start taking advantage of me I will bump back on that (Alpha) until you learn you must be nice to me, so that I will be nice to you (Beta). We will be nice to each other (Beta), because I insist that you comply or I will find a woman that will (Alpha).
See how that works?
Also as an aside, in the orginal Roissy post, Mr. Skittles was being discussed by two women comparing horror stories of their worst dating / boyfriend experiences and they discovered that they had both dated Mr. Skittles. So that’s probably the proof of the pudding that Skittling isn’t a LTR relationship move. In terms of an early dating thing, I think a large gift just tips your hand that you are highly interested in the girl, and that swings the power balance into her favor.
There’s a middle ground between frakking Skittles and $15,000 worth of flowers and it’s not $7500 worth of Skittles. Balance people, balance.
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