Mid-game is the most poorly understood, and poorly discussed aspects of game. This is particularly a problem because it is, in fact, one of the most important parts of game.
Mid-game is far, far more important than opening – and yet you’ll find tons of material on opening, and shockingly little on mid-game. Beginners will ask question after question about openers or early-set routines, not noticing that they’ve been opening girls successfully for years – since long before they became aware of game – and that almost all of their mis-steps are in the mid-game. Many PUA’s have heard the phrase “The game is played in comfort” but still focus all their attention on the opening phases of game. This stops now.
Mystery (who got so many things right) got us all off on the wrong foot in his vital work “The Mystery Method.” First, he spends a tremendous amount of time talking about the first three stages of game (Opening, Attraction, and Qualification) and almost nothing on “mid game,” which he calls “comfort.”
Calling mid-game “Comfort” has led countless would-be PUAs down the wrong track. They assume, because it’s called comfort, that the goal is to make the girl as comfortable is possible. So they diffuse tension, they avoid escalation (which they worry will make the girl nervous), and they cater to the woman’s needs – and then they wonder why they keep landing in the friend zone, despite opening well, attracting well, and qualifying properly.
The first thing to let go of, when approaching the mid game, is the concept of comfort. Yes, you are making the girl comfortable with the idea of sleeping with you, reducing last-minute resistance and avoiding buyers remorse. But she’s is going to get comfortable with the idea of sleeping with you not from any attempt of yours to make her comfortable in a conventional sense, but rather merely from you consistently showing her that her initial attraction to you was not a flash-in-the-pan fluke.
In fact, trying to make the girl “comfortable” is counter-productive. If you wanted to make sure she was comfortable, after all, you wouldn’t escalate kino – what if she doesn’t want you to? – and you would diffuse tension (tension can be uncomfortable!). But you need to build sexual tension, not diffuse it. If a girl doesn’t feel sexual tension with you, you’ll land in the friend zone very quickly.
As a rule of thumb, expect it to take about seven hours from qualification to seduction. Sometimes it will take less (sometimes much less). Sometimes it takes more. But as a general guideline, know that if you’re consistently taking much longer than seven hours to get to seduction, you’re progressing too slowly and will wind up in the friend zone more often than you should.
Mystery broke down the comfort stage into three parts, C1, C2, and C3. It’s important to remember, however, that these three stages are fundamentally different from the stages of opening. In the first three stages (opening, attraction, and qualification) you are doing something different in each stage. Where C1, C2, and C3 are differentiated by your location: C1 is comfort building in the original, meeting location. C2 is comfort building in other locations where seduction is not possible, such as on a date, and C3 is comfort building at a seduction location.
The key here is that you’re fundamentally doing the same things in all phases of comfort. And what are these things?
First, you are smoothly building kino escalation with lots of casual contact, slowly escalating up to kissing, while diffusing future last-minute-resistance by taking a “two steps forward, one step back” approach.
Second, you are using text game to keep the girl hooked, while using good phone game to set up a date – which we usually refer to as a “day two” or “D2” rather than a date, because we reject the man-pursuing-woman model inherent in the word date – while maintaing your value and refusing to chase.
Third, you are building compliance by rewarding good behavior from the girl and punishing bad behavior.
Fourth, you are keeping the girl supplied with good, happy emotions and generating buying temperature spikes.
Fifth, you are developing rapport and an emotional connection.
Lastly, and most importantly, you are continuing to hit the girl’s attraction switches while remaining consistent and congruent to the image you initially presented.
That seems like a lot to juggle all at once, but most of them because quite simple with a little practice. We’ll break them all down individually in future articles so you can see how they all work.
Mid-game is a soul of game. Don’t be one of the many newbies who get bogged down in the minutiae of opening – how you handle the mid-game will determine how successful you are.
