You’ve heard it from your mom, your grandma, from movies, teachers, and from the girls trying to help you out: Act like Prince Charming. These people are well-meaning, they think they’re giving you good advice, but they’re wrong. (Okay, some of them have an obvious self-interest, but they’re still wrong.)

The Prince Charming type compliments the girl, brings her gifts, opens the door for her, defers to her opinion on everything, fights her enemies, and to put it simply: he treats her like a princess. That might sound exactly like what a girl wants, but if you look at the way guys who do that get treated – and look at your own results with this – then you know it isn’t very effective.

Calibrate Your Interactions

There’s nothing inherently wrong with giving gifts, opening the door, or paying compliments. The problem that guys run in to is that they do these things in situations that do not justify them. Things you do for girls should be based on the level of relationship that you have, and more specifically, on her level of commitment and investment in your relationship.

If you’re out at a bar and you’ve just started talking to a girl it would be appropriate to say that you like her dress, or earrings, or hair, or whatever. It’s a one-off compliment that doesn’t really require much from you and it can serve as a bit of an icebreaker, and even better if you compliment her on something you can have an actual conversation about. “Have you always had a pixie cut? Did your parents flip out? How much do you save on shampoo costs?”

What you don’t want to do is meet a girl and within the first two minutes of talking to her buy her a drink. Giving girls everything they want in an effort to get them to like you is called supplication, and it doesn’t work. Giving her things will make her want to use you; it won’t make her be attracted to you.

You Should Still Be Nice

This doesn’t mean you should treat girls like shit. In fact, virtually every reputable PUA out there will tell you that you should be nice to everyone you meet. Being nice doesn’t mean hurling money and compliments at people. No one wants to feel like their interaction with you is a sort of economic exchange, as if buying her a drink entitles you to the next twenty minutes of her time. Commodifying relationships is the surest way to kill any chance at attraction.

Being nice just means listening to people, being considerate, treating people like individual human beings, making an effort to get to know and understand them, and sometimes doing something for them when the cost to you is dwarfed by the benefit to them, like holding a door open for an old lady with a walker, or letting the person behind you in line go first when he’s only got two or three things and you’ve got a full shopping cart.

The Exception That Proves The Rule

The exception to the rule that you should not act like Prince Charming has one very important exception. You should act like Prince Charming if you are, in fact, Prince Charming. Sounds like a joke, but this will help to understand why you generally shouldn’t act this way. When women talk about what they want from a man they often envision Prince Charming, the man of infinite value to whom they are unconditionally attracted. Ordinarily, women are the gatekeepers in relationships, but with Prince Charming, he’s the gatekeeper; he can choose any woman he wants. With that script flipped, what women want is for the incredibly attractive guy to choose them and to make them feel special for being chosen.

Back in the real world, things don’t work like that. She’s the gatekeeper, and you’re not starting off with a mountain of assumed value. If you start an interaction by acting like Prince Charming, you’re actually going to be demonstrating very low value. You’re telling her that whatever surface-level attractiveness she has is enough to win you over and she doesn’t have to do anything else. She knows that only an average frustrated chump has such low standards. What this means is that you have to demonstrate your high value while simultaneously eliciting value from her, and only one there is mutual investment in the relationship can you start doing the traditional nice guy stuff.

The Other Exception

And that brings me to another myth about pickup: You should never act like Prince Charming. That’s not quite true.

As I said, Prince Charming is of course immune to this rule, but there’s actually a second (and much more common) exception. You can play the nice guy once she has a strong desire for you.

You’re not in Prince Charming Can Do No Wrong Land, and you need to avoid becoming a completely supplicating doormat, but you should turn the prince knob up just a little bit. Once she wants you, you become the gatekeeper, and now she is starting to feel insecure, anxious, and is afraid of being rejected. That push-pull you did before that showed you were fun, not a pushover, and not intimidated by beautiful women now feels like you’re clueless about where the relationship is, and perhaps insecure about dropping the techniques and making a personal connection (Dancing Monkey Syndrome). The cocky-funny attitude you had now makes her feel like she’s being rejected, and she’ll start to view you as insensitive, intentionally distant, and a complete asshole.

The Takeaway

Do not assume that expressed preferences (what people say they want) will be the same as their revealed preferences (the choices they actually make). Be nice, treat people like people, but calibrate. Always freaking calibrate, understand the dynamics of your interactions and relationships, and make sure your actions are appropriate to the context.