Disclaimer: I write from the perspective of a straight male looking to develop relationships with straight women, so while I primarily speak to that (large) subset of sedditors, please feel free to chime in with other perspectives/dynamics, because it could certainly be different from a woman or LGBT PUA’s POV.

OK Sedditors, I’m hardly a PUA and just fresh out of AFC-hood, but I had a realization today that got me standing up and walking around for a bit. I think this will be helpful for many other posters here so let me share it:

Facebook, Google Talk, Skype chat and other IM services … avoid them like the plague. Seriously, stay away from that shit. If you are one of those people that use IM a lot, perhaps out of a habit developed from using it so much in high school or something, you need to wean yourself off of it. In one of the sidebar posts, one of the mods talked about how you can’t build attraction but you can lose it in many ways with prolonged IM interactions – this is true.

Why are these communication channels so deleterious to game? Think about the conversations you have with women in real life, or at least picture how’d they go. You’re sitting close to each other, right next or at right angles, some position where you can not only speak to someone but sense them in so many different ways. You can drink in the scent of her skin and hair, and grasp the subtle tonalities of her voice. Most importantly, you can communicate attraction by touch. What does the oft-posted DiCarlo escalation ladder say about what you say to someone to escalate? Nothing, because what you say absolutely doesn’t matter.

When you are in a prolonged text-only interaction, you are put in a state where you are basically being robots to each other. Sure, you may think you are having some deep philosophical conversation or shit like that, but you are building no attraction and escalating nothing. At best you lecture each other for a bit – actually, at best, you cyber a bit, but that’s not real sexual tension you’re building there because she identifies none of that with the physical you until you escalate things in person. At worst you bore each other to death and end up in the friendzone – actually, at worst, she calls the cops on you because she suspects you of being a rapist and child molester.

So where does that leave us? Some of these IM services are just damn useful for keeping in touch with friends, business partners and other such people, even if they do jack bauer shit for helping us build attraction with women. So this is my solution – I keep my Facebook account and GTalk active, but at least for my facebook, I turn my wall off and never friend girls I am gaming. If a girl attempts to friend me I usually take it but never interact with them on facebook (you don't have to, though). If there’s a girl who I become interested in but is already a facebook friend, then I just add her to the list of people I appear offline in chat to. At no point must you invite these prolonged IM interactions by appearing available for them. She can do that with her friends. Fuck friendship, you’re not interested in that.

Seriously guys, when it comes to this “game”, the only winning move is to not play.

note: You know what the guides to online game here focus on? Transitioning out of online game and into an actual date AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE.