The “love at first sight” phenomenon is well-known. Even if you have not experienced it yourself you probably have heard friends talk about it. Statistically speaking, it seems to happen quite rarely and you may not even experience it at all in your life. Not all women you are going to interact with and end up having sex with will immediately fall in love with you, and vice versa. There is no need for that. However, there probably needs to be at least sympathy above a certain threshold for you to get anywhere. This is the phenomenon I will discuss in this article. I call it sympathy at first sight.

Over the years, I have had a few clients who to discuss their encounters with women on a play-by-play basis. This is a great approach if you do not mind taking notes and reflecting on your encounters with women. Others prefer a big-picture approach were they want to discuss certain themes, which is obviously fine with me as well. One pitfall of the play-by-play approach, which dates back to the early days of the PUA community and its focus on “routines” is that it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that there are certain moves or actions, like in a chess game, that would have led you to succeed with any girl you meet. If you only made the right choices with regards to what you say or do, you will be able to advance the interaction until, finally, your dick enters her. The chess metaphor may sound awkward, but it is surprisingly appropriate, albeit not in the way normally assumed. If you make one great move after another in chess, you are not guaranteed victory. Instead, you are only guaranteed to not lose the game. In fact, after a certain level of mastery of the game, provided you play against an evenly-matched opponent, a draw is the most common outcome. In order to win, your opponent needs to make mistakes, however small, that slowly accumulate. In other words, your opponent needs to actively contribute to your eventual victory by playing worse than you do. This is similar when interacting with a woman. If she does not want to play along but instead blocks all the moves you want to make, at best you will part on a friendly note.

There needs to be a baseline of sympathy. If she does not like you or if she does not like you enough then it does not matter what you do. In my book Minimal Game as well as repeatedly on this blog, I speak about yes/no/maybe girls. Some girls are immediately into you, which is the smallest subset. Quite a few girls will not consider you at all, for whatever reason. This includes women who are fully committed to their partner. Lastly, there is the category of girl who kind of like you. They are interested enough in you to give you a shot but they are not entirely sure yet whether you are worth investing any time and effort into. This may not sound promising, but you can convert many more of such girls into lays than you may think. There are women who are sometimes just bored, see a guy who seems good enough and end up having sex with him. They embrace the “I guess you will do” mindset. The bigger a slut you are dealing with, the more her thinking gravitates towards that very mindset, for better or worse.

You have probably made the experience that with some people you click. You find it very easy to talk to them, and this does not necessarily mean that these people are generally easy to talk to. Psychological compatibility is an obvious aspect in social interactions. Yet, for whatever reason self-help hucksters do not tell you about it because they much rather sell you a book or a course on how to “get to yes” or how to sell anything to everyone. This is at best a bizarre exaggeration and at worst an outrageous lie.

The spark of initial sympathy is sometimes delayed. Maybe you have met women who were lukewarm at first. These women like you enough to be willing to meet up with you and when they first see you in a different environment, their perception of you completely changes. I recall one or two instances where I quickly got contact details of some girl, a “weak close” in PUA lingo. These women were interested enough to see where this would be going and when they met me one-on-one, they blurted out, “I totally did not realize how tall you are!”, or something along these lines. This may sound silly but imagine a busy club, a chick on a bar stool and you bending forward to briefly chat with her. Of course, you need to bend down because otherwise she would not hear you. As a consequence, she may easily believe that you are a few inches shorter than you actually are. Once they get the complete picture, the effect of (delayed) sympathy at first sight happens. This is not a misnomer because before that, she did not have the full picture yet.

An initial lukewarm reception can of course turn sour as well. This is probably a lot more common for men who meet up with a girl they originally came across in a club or a bar. In a more well-lit environment, she may suddenly look ten years older than you remember, which can put an end to your interest in gaining carnal knowledge of her. From that point onward, there is no recovery because you cannot fake being sexually attracted to someone. Maybe you can fool her for a bit, in case you do not want to hurt her and thus decide to sit through the date. However, you will not be able to fool yourself. If you are no longer interested in her then that is it.

In a professional setting I have also encountered this effect. A recall an interaction where one of these women-on-tech in the company needed some information from me. She reached out to me via Slack, which is essentially Discord for businesses, and she seemed quite detached. I suggested sorting this out quickly in a quick video chat, so we did. When she saw me on camera, she immediately perked up and her eyes got bigger. Then she was smiling and even giggled. After we had resolved the work issue, she tried engaging me in some chit-chat about work, asking me about my day-to-day, which triggered a few that’s-so-cool’s. I did that because it is better to get along with some people at work. This is an example of someones eagerness to interact with you changing completely after realizing that they actually like you. This was not in the context of romantic relationships, but the same principles apply. Well, many women have a hard time maintaining professional boundaries, so let me rephrase this by saying that this was supposed to be a professional interaction, not an awkward one-directional speed-dating session.

In short, if you want to get anywhere with a woman, there needs to be the initial spark of sympathy. This may happen right when you meet her, but it can also be delayed. However, this only works if her first impression of you was incomplete, due to circumstances. Once she has formed an opinion of you, the outcome is basically determined. You can still derail the conversation with “anti-game” but on the other hand, you are not going to get a woman to sleep with you if she remains in the “maybe” zone for too long. She will just write you off as a romantic prospect.