HOW DO I TOUCH SOMEONE AT THE RIGHT TIME? from "Dear As

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JediFrogman wrote:

"I've tried touching women in harmless places (e.g. arm, etc.) during conversation, only to get a very awkward vibe from the whole thing. How do I touch someone appropriately at the right time?"


All right! This is a great question! Aspies have trouble with this one all the time. Kudos for bringing it up.

I'm assuming for our purposes that this a romantic question, and you're not idly wondering about when to touch middle-aged matrons or your chess buddies on the arm for most persuasive effect:

Touch says to a woman, "I want you." That's the cardinal rule you have to understand right off the bat. Any woman you touch is going to read into that touch, and the body language signal she'll get is that you've just revealed your cards: i.e., you're interested in a physical relationship with her. (She'll get this message whether you mean it or not, by the way....)

What happens when you throw down your cards? You're in trouble. The reason is, NT women are programmed with the urge to seek out the most alluring men in terms of status and unavailability. That's what the Movie-Star Effect is: all the women want to sleep with a certain guy precisely because all the other women want to sleep with that same guy, thus giving him very high status and making him unavailable to most women, just from the fact alone that he can't sleep with them all.

Once you touch a woman, any shred of allure and unavailability you had vanishes in a puff of smoke. She knows she's got you if she wants you. You're available, so you instantly become uninteresting. That's the "vibe" you were getting, I'm willing to bet. As soon as you touch a girl--even on the arm--she says to herself: "This guy has stopped playing the game. He just showed his true intentions. How boring. I've got to go after some other fella."

How to avoid this romantic Waterloo? Well, you play a little game. The mechanism is simple, but requires precision. First, you use the Movie-Star Effect to your own benefit and make yourself interesting, funny, and fun, but keep your availability doubtful. You might want her, you might not. This behavior drives women insane.

Why? In the game of flirting, a woman wins points if she gets you to want her and show it. She can tell all her friends about how she "had this one guy drooling over me and touching my arm, but then I totally walked away and left him panting." (Women share these stories of conquest all the time. Just listen to them in the mall sometime.) You upset a woman's game if you sparkle and show how great you are but don't move on her, either verbally or by touching her. When you upset her game, that's when YOU start winning the points. She gets very confused ... and intrigued. "Wait a minute: this guy's no Brad Pitt, and yet he's not grabbing my butt and drooling over me. Wow. He must be rich and hiding it, or powerful or something and have his pick of girls... I don't know, but I'm sticking around." And by the way, the money or power aren't really that important. It's the mystery and tension that keeps her riveted on you.

You keep a woman in this tension of "Does he want me?" for as long as it takes. If you want to take her home that night, then you keep your hands completely off until you're back at your place/her place and the door's shut. If you want a date, you keep the tension there until next time by taking her number and leaving without giving away whether you really want her or not. That will induce her to go out on the date with you. If you like to move things more slowly and wait a while for sex, then keep your hands off until you're by the river under the stars, then kiss her passionately and resolve the tension that way, and start dating. She'll be enchanted.

However you like to do it, the mechanism is the same: don't throw the game away by resolving the romantic tension and showing her you're hooked until the moment of peak excitement, be it sex, kissing, or just a warm hug. Women crave romance, and maintaining tension is key to romance.

So ... to wrap it up: don't touch her, even if she touches you, unless your goal for the evening is to stroke some elbow and get bored looks. You can touch other women--some good friend, maybe, 'cause that will only heighten her suspicion that you must be a player--but not the girl you really find interesting. Your restraint will pay off.

P.S. If you want to learn a lot more about this, I recommend The System: How to Get Laid Tonight by Roy Valentine (see the review of this book on this blog) and How to Succeed With Women by Ron Louis. Both are excellent books on the game of love.


(If you would like to ask a question of "Dear Aspie..." about flirting, small talk, and other mysteries of non-verbal communication, simply PM your question to GroovyDruid. Due to the amount of PMs received, not all questions will be published, but they'll all be considered. Thanks for sharing!)

I've always thought of it as a game where first one to touch the other loses. The object is to make her touch you. In anyway. I cannot think of a time that a girl has actually touched me by accident. As a matter of fact, I have seen ones who I know were repulsed by me go through almost comical extents to avoid touching me in a crowded hall for example. On the other hand, usually when a girl has touched me in some way, even just a "oops I stumbled walking by" I've always discovered that there was an attraction. Unfortunately, I always discovered the attraction much later (hey, I'm an Aspie ) As above, this only applies to the NT ladies.