Plate Theory VI: Abundance & Scarcity

Law 16: Use Absence to Increase Respect and Honor
Too much circulation makes the price go down: The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. If you are already established in a group, temporary withdrawal from it will make you more talked about, even more admired. You must learn when to leave. Create value through scarcity.

Plate Theory is for your benefit, not for women’s. That might sound harsh, but it’s a method intended to increase your value as a commodity that works on two levels. First, the external – by practicing honest, non-exclusive dating you communicate to your prospective plates that you are in demand. I’ve gone so far as to tell men to foster this sense by never answering the phone from Friday to Sunday evening, even when they have no other plans. The perception that your attention is sought after increases it’s value – it’s when men are too eager to get with a woman that their attention becomes worthless and IL declines. Nothing serves a man better than having 3 or 4 women competing for his exclusive attention and fostering in them that feminine competitivie anxiety in as subtle and covert a way as possible. It’s a real art that women are all too familiar with. Women are natural plate theorists, they simply use their varying degrees of physical attractiveness to line their plates up.

Secondly, plate theory is for a man’s own internal benefit. As I said in my original thread, it’s much easier for a man not to give a shit if he truly doesn’t give a shit. It’s far easier to deal with women on the basis of indifference when you have a subconscious knowledge that there are at least 3 other women who’ll be happy to have your attention if one plays games with you.

You will invariably pass most shit tests in this fashion. The reason men fail most shit tests is because they subconsciously telegraph too much interest in a single woman. Essentially a shit test is used by women to determine one, or a combination of these factors:

a.) Confidence – first and foremost
b.) Options – is this guy really into me because I’m ‘special’ or am I his only option?
c.) Security – is this guy capable of providing me with long term security?

By practicing Plate Theory, your mental attitude will be such (or should be such) that you will pass most shit test based simply on this practice. Abundance thinking is the root of Plate Theory. A lot has been written about approaching women (and really life in general) from a position of Abundance. People often make the mistake of assuming that having a wide variety of choices tends to cheapen the commodity, and to a degree this is accurate, but it also allows for a better, learned awareness of which choice amongst the pool is common and which is of higher quality.

,…but Rollo, I’m so busy that I have no choice but to ignore and postpone. They sense it and seek me out. I worry that I’ll create crazies. My weekends are jammed. At what point do we stop?

This is a the best problem you can have. You’ve successfully flipped the script; you’ve gotten to a point where it becomes instinctive and your plates actively seek out your attention. By default, you’re creating value by scarcity. At what point do you stop? How old are you? If you’re under 30 stay in the game. If you’re over 30, stay in the game, but cool things off occasionally – the only time a man should even contemplate monogamy is after experiencing abundance. If you’re innundated with women occupying your weekends, consider hooking up with a proven plate on a Thursday evening and reserve your weekends for your other pursuits.

Also, don’t be afraid to clear your schedule to hang out with friends or do other things that interest you. Remember, scarcity increases value. Too many guys think that plate spinning is something that needs a constant effort, it doesn’t. In fact applying yourself equally across all your active plates only pushes you closer to settling for one or two. Most guys think that they have to continually spin their plates, you don’t; if you’re doing it correctly they’ll spin themselves for you. The anxiety is that if you don’t keep applying attention to any one plate she’ll lose interest and fall off. Sometimes this is the case and you have to be prepared to accept it, some plates have to break in order to spin more, and that’s OK. More often than not however, your scarcity will create value and mystique, thus they will pursue you for their affirmation.

Plate theory of course can be a means to an LTR, but bear in mind that it’s essential that you practice it long enough and effectively enough to determine what a quality woman means to you and how to recognize her. As with most Game skills, the AFC will use them to some degree of success up to the point that he finds his idealized “girl of his dreams” and launch into a self-destructive LTR because his idealization was based on juvenile impressions rather than a mature understanding of what a quality woman’s characteristics are. This is all due to a lack of concrete experience.

Spin plates for as long as possible, because once you do commit to an LTR, even with the tightest of Game you will lose a measure of the competitive anxiety that made your attentions valuable to any one woman. All your plates fall off AND the girl you’re engaged in an LTR with relaxes. This is root of why men find that the woman they had hot sweaty monkey sex with when they were dating becomes more sexually reserved a few months after they’re a couple. The competitive anxiety is relieved and therefore sexual frequency and quality is no longer a proving trait for her. That’s not to say there aren’t methods to stoke this anxiety in an LTR, but, by comparisson to being single, the frame of the relationship doesn’t have to be contested when she and you understand that she is your only source of intimacy and sex. In a committed relationship, you simply cannot spin plates.

Plate Theory V: Lady’s Game

I had a good amount of response on last Friday’s Plate Theory post asking for a more complete idea of women being natural Plate Theorists, so I thought I’d elaborate on this.

Female Plate Theory

For as often as I’ve mentioned women being natural plate theorists, I don’t think I’ve ever gone into detail about it. I think it’s pretty well established that I completely disagree with idea that women will only fuck one guy at a time. I could outline several women I know from experience in this, but really, observing behavior will bear this out fairly predictably. I will however agree that they are predisposed to, and are socially encouraged to, seek monogamy, but as in all things female the talk rarely matches the behavior. Sexuality is a woman’s first, best agency and even the homeliest woman know this – even when they’re just complaining about other women using it.

The principle that a woman’s first priority is to seek out security is true, and we’d be wise to bear this in mind when evaluating motives for behavior, but their methodology is what’s in question here. There is an understandable confusion for guys in this respect. On one hand women present a constant facade that the fear of being perceived as a slut (i.e. concurrently fucking more than one guy at a time) is primary to their self-respect and respectability. However, this has to be tempered with the desire to experience a variety of men in order to ensure the security/provisioning from the best among them. So in order to facilitate this women must practice a kind of calculated hypocrisy that is socially reinforced by the gender as a whole as well as some men (usually those so optionless as to excuse the behavior in order to get to her sexuality, or guys so conditioned that they overlook it as normal).

It is socially acceptable for a woman to blatantly spin plates.

Does this sound outrageous? While a woman who makes her sexual practices a bit too overt runs the risk of being perceived as a slut (which is dubious in this age as it is), most relatively attractive women covertly have a constant bullpen of starters ready to go to bat at any one time – these are also known as ‘Orbiters’. These are the attention providers, the “maybe” guys. And it makes little difference in terms of available options which she chooses at any given time, the very fact that she has five or six of them pursuing her is enough to boost her sense of self-worth, her social status within her same-gender peers, and give her the confidence to drop any one of her plates at a moments notice for any reason knowing that 2 or 3 more guys (or 20 more on facebook) stand ready to take his place, no questions asked and prepared rationalizations at the ready.

In addition, this practice is socially reinforced by women doing the same thing and the social conventions constructed to excuse the behavior. It’s the unspoken rule of a woman’s prerogative; she can always change her mind. This is a powerful tool for women –  in any situation, if a woman doesn’t choose to be sexual it is necessarily forced (or obligated), even when it’s after the fact. Either the “Jerk” forced her, physically or emotionally, or she had thought she wanted to, but later reconsidered – it makes little difference. In all social situations the default is to side with the feminine, the “weaker sex” – women, from sympathy or empathy, and men, from a desire to eventually become intimate with them. Dalrock expertly describes this convention in his “Don’t hit me, I’m a girl” post.

In either instance, the feminine prerogative is socially reinforced. That’s important to understand because even by my focusing on it here as a male, my motives for doing so become suspect. That’s how embedded this dynamic is – to question it risks ostracization. However, I also understand that for the greater part of women, this plate spinning dynamic isn’t a conscious effort on their part. In fact I’d suggest that it’s so thoroughly recognized that women default to it autonomously. Also, this is a good example of the first principle of power – when you have power, always feign powerlessness.

Free Reign

So, with a firm understanding that their behaviors will for the most part be excused, they are free to practice the feminine form of plate theory unhindered by social reprisal. The feminine plate spinning involves much more than sex though. Remember that attention is the coin of the realm in female society. The capacity to command attention determines self-esteem, peer status, sexual selectivity, and a host of other factors in a woman’s life, so spinning plates becomes more than just a “which guy am I gonna bang tonight” prospect. This dynamic and these factors are what makes women natural plate spinners. Even when a woman has no intention of ever becoming sexual with a “maybe” guy, his attention still has some value to her. It appeals to the long term prospective for security that’s a continuous subroutine running in her hindbrain. This is the rudimentary psychology behind hypergamy.

Now, combine all of this with women’s native language – covert communication – and it’s natural for a man to assume that a woman will only ever become sexual with one guy at a time. This serves the latent purpose of keeping him in a kind of stasis. If he assumes women will only be sexual under the precondition of commitment she is free to spin plates (essentially weighing options) as she pleases and sample at will what she sees as in her hypergamic best interest at the time. If the carrot looks good enough the guy will patiently pull the cart until such time as another, better carrot comes along. Either way he’s in that stasis. If a guy were to see her social and psychological machinations for what they are, he’d never pull the cart – so it serves women best that men think commitment should always be required for intimacy, even in the face of her behavior directly contradicting this.

Plate Wars

Lastly, this social dynamic serves as a very effective weapon for women against each other. As I stated in the last Plate Theory post, competition anxiety between women is something men can exploit for their own plate spinning, but the reason it is useful is because women so readily use it against each other. For a woman to say another is a “slut” translates into an overt betrayal of this unspoken social contrivance. She essentially is saying, “the rules are that women require commitment for sex, but here’s one who’ll never be worthy of any guy’s commitment because she wont play by the rules you suckers think she will.”

She is tacitly disqualified for a man’s commitment and is, at least in the accusing woman’s mind, a reduced threat in this feminine competition. She becomes exposed in the same game they’re all playing and in being so loses attention and therefore status and personal esteem. It seems petty to guys, but it’s really intra-gender warfare. Think of how many times an exceptionally attractive woman, that is completely anonymous to a group of women you happen to be with, berate her based on appearance alone. “She’s must be a tramp if she dressed like that.” These are the same women who’ll berate a man for basing his estimation of a woman on her outer appearance. This is feminine competition anxiety. Ask a woman to name the most attractive female actress they can think of. Odds are it will be a woman (who as a guy you’d never think of) who presents the least threat of this anxiety.

Gentlemen, as I’m fond of saying, women will fuck. They may not fuck you, they may not fuck me, but they will fuck someone. The girl who bangs the hot guy at the foam party in Cancun on Spring Break within 5 minutes of meeting him is the same girl who want’s you to believe that they’ll only fuck one guy at a time and then after commitment. All women are sexual, you just need to be the right guy at the right time for the job.

Plate Theory IV: Goal-State Monogamy

Whenever a guy uninitiated to the concept of spinning plates reads the theory for the first time his first response is usually rejection of it because it conflicts with their monogamy-as-goal mindset. Understand, this is always going to be a tough stretch for any AFC of course, but also the ‘natural’ guy who doesn’t have much trouble attracting women. Monogamy-as-a-goal is a feminine imperative social contrivance, but it also has roots in our natural desire for security, so it makes anything even remotely like plate spinning counterintuitive. The feminine imperative pounds into men’s collective consciousnesses over the course of a lifetime that monogamy will cure loneliness, make them responsible, provide them with a constant supply of sex, and a host of other things that assures them it’s “the right thing to do” and in their own best interest. This then leads the more option-less individuals to develop and practice AFC methods and rationales in accordance with what they believe (and have been told by) women is required of them in order to achieve their monogamous intimacy.

So understandably when the principle of being non-exclusive is presented to them in a rational way (in stead of a ridiculed way as it’s normally passed off as) it conflicts with this perceived path to happiness in monogamy. The very idea that any man would be better off with more options in this arena of life, or could feasibly and logistically pull it off seems foreign. As a counter to this he makes up rationales as to why it wont work or wont work for him.

Logistics

“I can’t spin plates because I have too little time, I can’t manage more than one without the other finding out, etc.”

If you are indeed spinning plates in a healthy, upfront, non-exclusive way this should never be an issue. There are Game-aware Men with less time than most who manage 4-5 different girls in a week without having them consume all their leisure and business time. I don’t suggest that you go this route per se, because for the better part PUAs rely on a dishonesty in non-exclusivity. However, the reason they are capable of this is because they’ve perfected plate spinning effectively enough to have the plates spin themselves.

Most uninitiated AFCs reason that they MUST, at all costs, apply a constant effort to each and every girl they encounter at risk of losing a “good one.” Besides this being indicative of ‘soul-mate thinking’, what they fear is losing a plate because they are unaccustomed to having the leisure to do so. This is evidence of a scarcity mentality that is a result of their monogamy-as-goal preconditioning. Plate Theory necessitates an attitude of fearlessness – not carelessness, fearlessness. When you’re practicing Plate Theory your plates should call you. You are the PRIZE and the Prince who’s time is valuable and sought after. You should be the object of women’s pursuit. That said, you still have to make an effort to see them and keep the attention you do apply to them valuable, but this must be done with the attitude that if one plate falls you’re confident in your other options or your ability to generate new options.

Personality Type

“I’m just not like that. I don’t want to be considered a playah. I could never do that to a woman. How can anyone be like that?”

This rationale is a common one and not limited just to AFCs. There are plenty of otherwise confident, positively masculine men who’d still think they owe it to women to allow them to set the frame of their relationships without any fear of competition anxiety. Players are men who’re dishonest – they are not spinning plates because they are isolating each plate independent of the other, and this goes back to logistics. Of course you can’t find time for anything else if all you do is try to coordinate each individual story with each plate for fear that they discover each other. The plate spinning Man has no need for this, because he NEVER IMPLIES EXCLUSIVITY TO ANY PLATE. Either they accept this or they’re not a plate to consider. Done in a frank, honest, yet indirect above-table way you will not be a ‘Player’ and you will establish yourself as Man who’s attention is worth competing for.

Women would rather share a successful man than be saddled with a faithful loser. This perfectly sums up Plate Theory vs. Monogamy-as-Goal mindsets. Men in general gravely underestimate the power of female competition anxiety and how useful it really is. As I’ve said before, women are natural plate theorists – they are accustomed from a very early age to mitigate multiple sex-interests, they simply learn how to balance their indirect communications with that anxiety in their own plate spinning. Anxiety in women is good for men. Even when they make no effort to use it or would never consider it if they knew it’s usefulness it is ALWAYS present. Everything a woman does on a daily basis is colored by competition anxiety. Make up, clothing, shoes (God, the SHOES!), indirect communications with men and women, social contrivances, comparing and evaluating dates and possible suitors, EVERYTHING is bourn from this competitive desire to achieve security with the best possible guy and make damn sure the girl next door doesn’t get him first. This anxiety is analogous to men’s consummate fear of rejection and all of the myriad rationales he’ll create and the Buffers he’ll devise to avoid it.

Bear in mind that monogamy is a dictate of the feminine imperative. It is the social contract that the feminine ultimately needs in order to quell a constant desire for security in a very chaotic world. When you are predisposed to monogamy-as-goal thinking, or trying to break yourself of this, understand that this is a tool of the feminine imperative. That’s not to discount the overall merits of monogamy, but it is to make you aware of how it’s acculturated into men as a responsibility to providing monogamy. Men who find themselves in a state of internal conflict about abandoning monogamy-as-goal are really confronting a fundamental shift in their prior conditioning.

Plate Theory III: Transitioning

You cannot help anyone until you’ve first helped yourself.

The following was posted with permission from a consult I did.

Hi Rollo, my name is Akash and I am big fan of your posts. They are always lucid, logical, and insightful.

I discovered the community about 5 months ago after yet another failed relationship characterized by highly AFC behavior on my part. I ended it with a tremendous amount of guilt as I felt that because she was a “good person” I ought to have made it work even though I wasn’t in love with her. I am 27 years old.

Based on your posts I would really appreciate your advice on two issues:
(1) how to make the best use of my impending return to school in May for a second undergraduate degree and;
(2) how to overcome the cognitive dissonance I feel about pursuing women outside the confines of a committed relationship as I still suffer from social conditioning that tells me I will hurt women by pursuing primarily sexual relationships with them and so it is immoral to do so.

If you would like to post a reply on the forum, rather than by a PM, for the benefit of others that is fine with me. I wanted to direct these queries to you though as I believe I could benefit from your worldy wise opinion.

Sincerely look forward to hearing from you.

Best,
Akash

Akash,

I’ll give you a run down of what I can gather from your initial post, but understand that what you’ve given me here is pretty limited as far as information is concerned. I can only assume certain things from the very brief description of your life so take what I write with that in mind. In the future give me a better account of what your AFC behaviors were, how your relationships have ended, family background, where you live, why you’re pursuing a second degree, etc. I can be more accurate and avoid assumptions this way.

To begin with, you’ve only been involved in the “community” for the past 5 months so the first thing I’m going to tell you is that it takes time to mold your personality and unlearn mental schemas you’ve become conditioned to consider integral parts of your current personality. One of the biggest obstacles most men have with accepting the fundaments of a positive masculine mindset is the attitude that personality is static and uncontrollable by them. A lot of this “that’s just how I am” mentality comes from this basic conditioning and needs to be addressed from the outset since this almost universally is an ego-investment on the part of a guy who’s probably emotionally distressed, confused and/or frustrated.

Understand now that personality is ultimately what YOU determine it to be. This isn’t to say that external factors don’t influence personality; indeed these variables and outside influences are exactly the reason men such as yourself do seek out the community. However, it is you who determine what is comfortable for you and what will constitute the traits that makes your personality your own. You are most definitely not a blank slate, but you have the capacity to erase parts you don’t like or are unusable and rewrite new parts that you like and prove efficient.

(1) how to make the best use of my impending return to school in May for a second undergraduate degree

This all depends on what your own personal goals are. The best use you can make of this time is to devote yourself completely to achieving the purpose for which you decided to pursue a second degree in the first place. I can only assume you are working for this degree with a set outcome in mind, but is this what you truly want? I ask this because I know far too many men who’ve altered the course of their lives to better accommodate the women in their lives or to facilitate their insecurities and fear of rejection. It’s not an unfamiliar story to me to hear of how a guy opted for a certain university or a career path because he’d convinced himself that it would sustain a relationship that he was fearful of loosing or he felt was his “responsibility as a man” to be supportive of her ambitions at the sacrifice of his own. The conclusion of this scenario, more often than not, ends with a bitter man, mad at himself with the long term results of his choices after the woman he’d strived so long to accommodate leaves him for another man who held fast to his own identity and ambition – which is exactly what makes him attractive.

I’m not sure how or if this fits into your conditions, but let it serve as an illustration for reclaiming and remolding your own personality. Only you have the hindsight to assess why you made certain decisions in your life. I’m only asking you to be as brutally critical of your true motivations for making them. Maybe it’s time you review why you decided to pursue a second degree?

(2) how to overcome the cognitive dissonance I feel about pursuing women outside the confines of a committed relationship as I still suffer from social conditioning that tells me I will hurt women by pursuing primarily sexual relationships with them and so it is immoral to do so.

Akash, any reasonably attractive woman knows you’d like to have sex with her. It’s a primal, chemical instinct and to be bluntly honest, there’s nothing wrong with it. In certain Muslim sects men are allowed to take “temporary” wives for a set period of time in addition to their “permanent” wives so long as they support them financially. Some Mormons practice open polygamy in a similar fashion. Some men marry and divorce multiple times (and support them congruously). All of these practices are considered, to a greater or lesser degree, moral. The dissonance occurs when the rationalizations for a behavior conflict with the motivations for it and the associative psycho-social stigmas that get attached to it. Sorry for the $10 words here, but your feelings of guilt or hesitancy in a desire to explore multiple relationships is a calculated result of a very effective social conditioning with a latent purpose meant to curb a natural impulse.

Recognizing this is the first step to progressing beyond it and actually using it (responsibly) to your own advantage. As men, our biological impetus is to have unlimited access to unlimited sexuality with females bearing the best physical attributes. This is a rudimentary fact and on some level of consciousness both men and women understand this. No amount of proselytizing or social conditioning will erase what God and evolution hard-coded into our collective bio-psychological desires and behaviors. Admittedly, social conventions have historically made a good run at limiting this drive, but it can never (nor should it ever) purge this, because in essence it is a survival-ensuring attribute for us.

I wont argue against the utility in the latent purpose of absolute monogamy. No other method proves more valuable in parental investment and developing a strong masculine and feminine psyche in a person than that of a committed, opposite sex, two-parent family. I feel it’s necessary to add here that I am thoroughly unconvinced that gender identity is exclusively a set of learned behaviors as many in the mainstream would try to convince us of. There is simply too much biological evidence and the resulting psychological/behavioral response to gender differences to accept this, making it vitally important that a child (and later a healthy adult) be taught a healthy appreciation for both the masculine and feminine influences in their psyches.

The genders were meant to be complimentary, not adversarial. I certainly would never condone infidelity based on just this principle alone since it seems the most beneficial for healthy adults. It’s when this healthy monogamy becomes clouded by infantile, emotionality and insecure romanticisms with the resulting expectations that are derived by them that it becomes necessary for a man to cultivate an attitude of being the PRIZE. Adopting this mindset broadens his selection of opportunities for monogamy to his greatest advantage prior to committing to monogamy. In other words, if you are essentially sacrificing your capacity to pursue your biological imperative (unlimited access to unlimited sexuality), pragmatically, you’ll want to choose a partner of the highest quality from the broadest pool of potential you are capable of attracting.

The downside of this proposition is twofold. First, your ability to attract a sizable pool of quality ‘applicants’ is limited by factors you immediately have available. At 37, if all goes well, you’ll be more financially stable and mature than you are at 27. The 37 year old Akash will, in theory, be more attractive to a long term prospect than the 27 year old Akash. Secondly, women’s sexual value decreases as they age, meaning there is no guarantee that your beautiful, vivacious, 27 year old bride will remain so at 37. In fact the odds are she wont.

All of this makes betting your biological imperative on monogamy critically important and thus deserving of the widest possible selection.

Men literally live and die according to their options, so it stands to reason they ought to entertain a prolonged period in their lives where they are open to exploring the most options they have access to while concurrently developing and improving themselves prior to making a commitment of this magnitude.

And this is precisely where most men fail. They buy into and internalize psychological social contrivances (i.e. ONEitis) that are little more than effective means of inculcating a self-expectation of accountability and liability to make this commitment, irrespective of maturity level or personal success (not simply financial success). The saddest ones, the AFC ones are the pitiable men who carry these contrivances into marriage and even old age without ever understanding that they had more potential which they squandered due to an inability to see past these contrivances and learn to be selective based on experience.

A truly powerful Man jealously guards his most precious resources; his independence and his ability to maneuver. In other words his options and his ability to exercise them. True power isn’t controlling others, but the degree to which you control the course of your own life and your own choices. Commitment to anything ALWAYS limits this. When you step through one door, a hundred more close behind you. You’re free to do what you want, right? You can always quit a job, divorce a wife, change your school, etc., but how many men do you know who are what they are today as a result of their own real doing, unfettered by how their choices impact their GF, wife, kids, parents, etc.? By comparison, how many guys do you know who dutifully stick with a dead-end job that’s slowly killing them because it’s better than dealing with the consequences and backlash it would have on his family? Are they free to quit? Sure, but not without an impact on their families and relationships.

So where does this leave you? You have 2 paths as I see it. You can sarge and explore your options with multiple LTRs and, should you decide to become sexually involved, do so while maintaining non-exclusivity with them. Put off and unlearn the expectations you’ve been conditioned to accept through (feminine beneficent) social contrivances and truly explore your opportunities while bettering your own conditions in anticipation for becoming monogamous at some later point. Or, you can remain in your sense of moral doctrine (no shame in this) and still non-exclusively date and explore your options while you continue to better yourself with the caveat that you know you’ll be limiting your depth of experience. I wont denigrate a decision to opt for this, but far too few religious men have the perseverance to stay objective in their decision to ‘hold out’ and overlook major character flaws in women they’d like to be their spouse in a furious rush to marry them and get to “the sex part.” Better to fall short in conviction than make hurried decisions that will alter your life.

And perhaps this isn’t even what you’re driving at? I don’t know if it’s a religious conviction or an internalized social contrivance that passes for one that’s the cause of your hesitancy, but isn’t it interesting that both are so closely associated? I know devout atheists who still believe in the fallacy of the ONE or the soulmate myth. Most women (and far too many men) look at me as if I’d denied the existence of God when I elaborate on why I think their eHarmony, induced fantasy of a soulmate is hogwash and psychologically damaging on a social scale.

Regardless, whatever your reasons, women should only ever be a compliment to a man’s life, never the focus of it. When you start living for a woman you become that woman. Never again compromise your own identity to receive the ever-changing approval she grants you. You have to be the PRIZE at all times, not just while you’re single. In fact, it’s imperative that you remain so into an LTR. My suggestion to you is not to even entertain the idea of monogamy until you are established in your career for 2 years, after your college is complete. Play the field, do whatever, but do not commit even to a girlfriend. Rather make a commitment to yourself, promise yourself you wont allow yourself to let emotionality and conditioned expectations of monogamy dictate what your goals will be or how you’ll achieve them.

It’s called enlightened self-interest; you cannot help anyone until you’ve first helped yourself.

Plate Theory II: Non-Exclusivity

Women would rather share a high value Man than be saddled by a faithful loser.

“I just started applying Plate Theory, and I have to say with all honesty that this is probably the best thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. The feeling of having options is addictive; the whole idea that you don’t come from a necessitous emotional state is genius, and in fact the more options you have, the more attractive you become to women (through the unconscious changes in your behavior), the more women become attracted to you, and the more options you have. Once you get it started, it’s hard to stop it.

Recently I’ve been Spinning Plates with some success, but there comes a point when I risk one girl finding out about another. How do I handle this without the risk of losing one of my plates? Should I even bother with the effort of spinning plates that aren’t as high a value as others?”

Real options are the cornerstone of confidence, so try not to think of it in terms of risk – as in you’re risking the loss of “a great girl”. Most guys get to a point where Game and plate spinning give them their first taste of real options to select from or fall back on when another doesn’t pan out. The problem arises when they spin enough plates successfully to the point where they think they’ve maxed out to their “best” option and the old scarcity mentality returns. Most times a guy who newly practices Game and plate spinning never really spins plates per se; he uses it for the first monogamous opportunity that’s been eluding him for so long and calls it quits. He never actualizes and internalizes an abundance mentality.

Spinning Plates doesn’t necessarily mean you’re fucking all of your plates. It’s more of a spreading out of your efforts across a wider pool of subjects. Some will reciprocate, and those you entertain. Others will not, or prove to be less desirable, and those you let fall. This isn’t as difficult as it sounds once you’ve established your own resolve to be non-exclusive. At some point women will attempt to corner you into exclusivity and this is where your resolve will be tested. Women love to say how they have Rules, well you must have Rules as well. This means not shacking up with a woman, not slipping into any routine with her, not calling her more than necessary to set up another sporadic date, saving your weekends for women who’ve had a proven IL in you (i.e. sex or intimacy) and relegating those who haven’t to Tuesdays & Wednesdays, etc. This may seem like a lot of micromanagement, but once you put it into practice in as pragmatic a way possible to accomodate your life you’ll find that the decisions you make regarding the plates you are choosing to spin will become automatic.

If you feel that you have something to lose with a particular girl, you’re no longer spinning plates – you’re thinking and approaching dating in terms of exclusivity. POOK’s great quote: “women would rather share a high value Man than be saddled by a faithful loser” A lot of guys (and almost every woman) have a big problem with the truth of this because they take it too literally. POOK was never suggesting that you overtly declare that you’ll be open to other options and that your girls should consciously be expected to accept this. Every woman takes this quote in this way, and with good reason because they don’t want to seem like an easy mark. When it’s on the table like that it unsurprisingly becomes an affront to their pride and self-worth. However, in practice, non-exclusivity has to be covert. It needs to be implied, not declared. Thus you see the truth in POOK’s observation – women’s behavior will bear him out. Imagination and competition anxiety paired with implied non-exclusivity are the tools for successful plate spinning.

Become the commodity she’s looking for.

A high value Man can spin plates, and sometimes those plates suspect there are, or know there are other plates in his rotation. They’ll tolerate it so long as he remains high enough value (or effectively presents that perception) or hypergamy wil move them along to another high value Man. As I state in Plate Theory, some plates fall off to be replaced by new plates. You must be willing and confident enough to let some of them fall. This is a tough reality for recovering chumps new to Game to accept. Deprivation has conditioned them to hang onto a “sure thing” and this becomes all the more difficult when the plate they happen to drop was the first woman they’d ever successfully applied Game to, or was hotter than any girl they’d previously been with.

As I stated earlier, you don’t have to be sexual with every one of the plates you’re spinning (this used to be called “dating” in the days before serial monogamy became the fashion). It’s the potential in knowing that you could be, or that there are women who will value your attention that prompts a competitive anxiety in women – often when you don’t even know you’re doing it. If you are sexual with some of the plates you’re spinning, so much the better since you know that they’re proven commodities and if one isn’t performing as you’d like, you have the unconscious knowledge that others will, or you have the proven ability to generate more options for yourself.

Monogamy is a byproduct, not a goal.

One of the biggest hurdles guys have with Plate Theory is breaking themselves of this ‘LTR-as-Goal’ mentality. Obviously I’m not anti-monogamy, however monogamy should never be a goal, it should be a by-product of Plate Theory, but only when you’ve properly filtered through enough plates to understand how options play into confidence and controlling the frame. If a woman is unwilling to be non-exclusive with you (i.e. “she’ll leave me if I see other girls” fear) she isn’t a plate to spin. This seems counterintuitive to a guy with an LTR-As-Goal mentality and it is, but the guy who can fearlessly, and honestly stay above-board with his intent is the one who’ll be spinning more plates. Most guys (AFCs in particular) are deathly afraid of losing that ONE perfect girl and so never even attempt to spin more than one plate, much less have any others to compare her ‘perfection’ to in the first place. I’ve even seen PUAs do exactly this. They’re so impressed with the success of newly perfected techniques that they settle for the ONE ‘dream girl’ and find that their attentions become valueless to her because she perceives she is his only option for intimacy, his script gets flipped on him, and he gets marginalized. It’s not a failure in technique, but rather a failure in his mindset.

So what do you do to establish your plates and be truly, and successfully, non-exclusive with women? Initially I’d suggest doing exactly what most women have perfected for the better part of their lifetimes, stay intentionally ambiguous. Women practice Plate Theory by default – they play the Coquette (hard to get), they know how to be ambiguous enough to keep their options open, but not so much as to let a guy’s interest fail. They naturally know that we only chase what runs away from us. They never commit fully, but still keep the carrot in front of the donkey.

Women communicate COVERTLY, with gesture, with looks, with veiled meanings – you have to communicate your intent to be non-exclusive COVERTLY. Never OVERTLY tell a woman you’ve got other plates than her spinning. Allow her to discover this by your mannerisms, your behaviors, and definitely by your availability to her. Create value through scarcity, don’t be so available to her, but just enough to keep her interest and allow her mind to consider that maybe you have other options. Even when you don’t, fomenting this anxiety is a VERY useful tool for you while you do get more plates to spin. Even the ambient confidence that comes from knowing you have a past, proven, ability to generate more sexual options for yourself will manifest itself in your personality and trigger this competition anxiety.

At some point a woman will resort to OVERT communications when she’s run out of options in her COVERT communications tool set. This is the point the anxiety becomes unbearable and the need for security forces her to be OVERT. This is usually the stage at which she’s ask something like “where is this going?” or “am I your girlfriend?” or she may even give you an ultimatum. See this for what it is, she feels powerless and this is a press to commit. This is the point at which you will end up as a “cheater” or you’ll continue to spin plates. You actually have a lot of options in this situation, in fact more than you will ever have with any individual woman. You can of course take the coward’s path and just agree to exclusivity with her, but in doing so you lose all options (for as far as you’re willing to commit) as she intently becomes your only means of intimacy. She becomes the broker for your sexuality and you lose power, whereas before YOU were in control of your sexual availability.

You could continue to spin her as well, but bear in mind she’s resorted to OVERTLY confronting you about it and it wont be the last you hear of it. Depending on how long you’ve had her around, you may simply just let her drop. You might also keep her going, but let her cool a bit and come back to her in a few week’s time. Again, this seems counterintuitive, but your attention will either wildly increase in her value of it or she’ll simply bug out in which case it wasn’t worth pursuing and you aren’t wasting your time and effort on a woman with less than 100% IL.

Confidence is derived from options.

Don’t think of plate theory as a filter so much as it is a means to reinforce confidence. If you were to step into the ring with a professional UFC fighter right now it’d probably be suicide for you. But train for a few years, spar with other fighters and win a few bouts and you’ll probably be confident enough in your past performances that you know you can hold your own in the ring. That’s the idea, confidence derived from the options of non-exclusive women in hand and from having successfully generated those options in the past.

It’s not a numbers game, it’s a non-exclusivity game. The goal isn’t racking up as many women as humanly possible in order to sift through the throng and find that one little golden flower. In fact that’s the key to disaster. There is no Quality Woman, that’s an idealization. Some are better than others of course, but you don’t find the perfect woman, you make the perfect woman. There is no needle in the haystack – that is Scarcity / ONEitis thinking – the point is to mold yourself and any woman who you do exclusively end up with into your own frame. This is a process that should come before you commit to exclusivity, not after. The world is filled with guys forever trying to catch up, control the frame and be the Man they should’ve been long before they entered an LTR. They spend the better part of their LTRs/Marriages trying to prove that they deserve their GF’s / Wife’s respect when they’d have done better in letting her come to that conclusion well before the commitment through a healthy dose of competition anxiety.

Plate Theory

Spin More Plates

Spin more plates.

A lot of people get confused when I use this analogy and I thought it prudent to write a post on just what I mean in this regard.

A Man needs to have a lot of simultaneous prospects spinning together. Think of each plate as a separate woman you are pursuing. Some fall off and break, others you may wish to stop spinning altogether and some may not spin as fast as you’d like, but the essence of plate theory is that a man is as confident and valuable as his options. This is the essence of the abundance mindset – confidence is derived from options.

This principle is the key to solving so many of the problems that dog the heels of beta AFCs and recovering AFCs. In fact I would say that this ideology should be the cornerstone to success for a man in many facets of life, not simply attracting and keeping women. A man with options has power, and from these options and this sense of power, a natural sense of confidence will manifest itself. A man without options becomes necessitous and this leads to a lack of confidence and a scarcity mentality. Necessitous men are never free.

The Cardinal Rule of Relationships
In any relationship, the person with the most power is the one who needs the other the least.

When a man spins more plates, when he has irons in the fire, when he is pursuing multiple women simultaneously, when he has options equally worth exploring, a man will have a natural, subconscious (but not exclusively) understanding that if one prospect does not expand, others very well may. This understanding has manifestations in a man’s behavior that women key on covertly. There are mannerisms and attitudes that a man with options will subconsciously convey to prospective women that they interpret, and give this man a value as a commodity to be competed for with other females.

On this sites in the PUA community, we are taught to emmulate this behavior since it is a key element in attraction and interest. Cocky-Funny is one such technique that trains a confidence behavior that (more often than not) essentially masks a deficit of options. In other words, C&F is a natural behavior for men with options that must be compensated for by those who don’t. This is why the ‘natural’ Alpha male seems to exude C&F effortlessly while those without the benefit of more plates spinning (or the confidence in the ability of spinning more) struggle with simple thngs like eye contact or initiating approaches. This is also a fundamental principle in the “I don’t give a fuck” mentality that pervades community technique – it’s much easier to actually not “give a fuck” if you have other prospects going simultaneously.

Shotgun Logic

One very important benefit that Plate Theory provides for a man is that it greatly curbs the propensity for ONEitis both in and out of an LTR.

Outside of an LTR, most guys subscribe to what I call the Sniper mentality. This is the AFC that applies all of his time, effort and resources to patiently waiting out his target, waiting for that perfect opportunity to summon enough courage in the most precise of conditions to take his one shot at the girl, who by then is the focus of his ONEitis. This process can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years in extreme cases, but all the while he voluntarily sacrifices his most valuable of resource – potential opportunity. The man who subscribes to Plate Theory can more easily avoid this situation as he goes hunting for women with a Shotgun; scattering as much influence across the broadest area possible. While the AFC fishes with a single line and a single hook, the Plate Theorist fishes with a trolling net, selecting the fish worth keeping and tossing back those who aren’t.

Inside an LTR, Plate Theory becomes more specified. The AFC placates and identifies with his partner because the balance has shifted to her advantage since he reinforces her understanding that she is his only source of intimacy. I can’t think of a better recipe for ONEitis since he become progressively more dependent on her as his only source of intimacy. The man that maintains, at the very least, the covert perception of options, either professionally or on an intersexual level (i.e. social proof that other women will compete for him) maintains this power balance. Most successful men have an innate understanding of this and this explains their popular reservations for committing to marriage, In an LTR, Plate Theory becomes a subtle dance of perception and recognizing how your partner interprets understanding a particular man’s options, but regardless, it reduces a guy’s tendency to regress into ONEitis in an LTR from his own self-perception and the confidence int inspires.

Natural Selection

As I illustrated in the fishing net analogy, spinning more plates allows you more opportunity to select from the largest pool of prospective choices and date them or drop them as you see fit. This has two benefits. First, it serves as valuable, though non-committed, experience for learning what a man requires for his own personal satisfaction. Experience teaches harsh, but it teaches best and the breadth of experience serves a man well. Who’s insight is more beneficial, the man who’s sailed the world over or the man who’s never ventured beyond a lake? Secondly, opportunity and options make a man the PRIZE. Rock stars, professional athletes and movie stars aren’t irresistable to women because of their celebrity, but because they blatantly, and with the highest form of social proof, prove they have options that other women will jealously compete for as well as the confidence that this unconscious knowledge naturally manifests itself in them.

What Plate Theory is not

My critics will often take a binary stance in their arguments with this idea stting that “they could never be with more than one woman at a time out of respect for her” or “so I should just lie to her and see other girls on the side?” To which I’d argue that these are feminized social conventions that attempt to thwart a man’s options in order to establish women as the prime selectors in intersexual relations. If it can be conditioned into a boy/man to ‘feel bad’ about seeing more than one woman at a time, it only better serves the female-as-chooser dynamic. To be sure, women are naturally the filters for their own intimacies, but it is essentially men who do the sexual selection. These convention’s latent purpose are designed to put selection of intimacy on a conditional basis that favors women, and as long as men will internalize this women will have a preconstructed social high-ground.

The way to circumvent this dynamic is brutal honesty and a committment to truthful, non-exclusivity with the plates you’re spinning. If you keep your options above board and are honest with any one girl and yourself about your choice to be non-exclusive, you not only remove the teeth from this convention, but you also reinforce yourself as a man with options (or at least perceived options). Further, critics will offer “well gee, if I did that with any woman she’d push off and dump me” to which I’ll refute – not if you establish this honestly from the outset. Most guys who’ve swallowed the ‘female power’ convention are too afraid or to preconditioned to even consider this as an option for seeing women. Letting a woman know, or covertly perceive, that you wont be exclusive to her pushes your commodity level up and implies options and potential success she’ll compete with other women to be associated with.

Plate Theory is also, most definitely not, a license to be indiscriminate with women. Just because you can spin a plate doesn’t necessarily mean you should spin that plate. Some aren’t worth spinning and a man with options should have no reservation about letting one go for a better one or two. In fact a man ought to be more discriminating in this regard since it affords him the best available from the largest selection.