Everyone is intrigued by a mystery, whether it is an old painting or a book or even a person. The compelling act of acting like an enigma, suggests author Chris Odom, is the best way for men to meet and develop relationships with attractive women.
He lists the secrets of his successes in the book “The Mystery Method: How To Get Beautiful Women Into Bed” as a strategy guide for those men who regularly come up short in their love lives. This book offers a lot of different ideas for the dating game that seem unorthodox but have a substantial amount of evidence for their success.
Books written by pickup artists are not unusual in the ongoing literature of dating between men and women. Few books, however, have had the success and lasting power of The Mystery Method because too few of them offer a consistent strategy that can be worked at and used in nearly any situation.
The Mystery Method is a contrast to many pickup books that offer the equivalent of a tabloid magazine’s approach to weight loss — “get any woman you want instantly” — by stressing building up your skills over the long term. This means studying behaviour a lot and failing a lot before you can make it click.
Some of the most valuable parts of The Mystery Method, even to those who are not interested in employing its strategies, are setting straight stereotypes about approaching and picking up women that have become commonly accepted in today’s lexicon.
For instance, the author lays out why opening by asking to buy a woman a drink is a major error since it automatically puts into her mind the idea that you are only interested in her body and that you are subservient to her whims. Quickly asking for her phone number, likewise, suggests much of the same thing. Men who try to pick up women using cliched approaches like pickup lines and complimenting her appearance are more likely to fail than to succeed.
Instead, The Mystery Method lays out how you should approach women in ways that seem counter-intuitive. For one part, it suggests that you should pay much more attention to the women you are not interested in going home with than those who you are.
It emphasizes talking with a woman’s less-attractive friend to cultivate feelings of jealousy and the desire to be paid attention by your target. It suggests using subtle put-downs (not blatant insults but minor observations) to create a sense of wanting to please you. Finally, it fosters the attitude that you should project a complete disinterest in sleeping with attractive women since they are bombarded hourly with men interested in hooking up with them.
These are merely starting tips and are only the tip of the iceberg regarding the complete style suggested by The Mystery Method. As like a mystery, little information should be available to you. Any woman is used to men bragging about their careers in front of her, about the money they make and the responsibilities they have and the cars they drive.
Instead of making yourself an open book, make her work hard for even the slightest details about yourself. This can be indirect, such as turning a question back around on her, or it can be entirely upfront, such as refusing to answer a question (in a playful, non-hostile manner) to leave her guessing.
For some men, this behaviour may not be challenging, but for others, it requires a complete re-education. It is easy to fall back into talking about yourself when you have nothing else to say. This is why The Mystery Method takes lots of practise before it becomes second nature, and why the author promises no quick fixes to your love life.
Much of The Mystery Method is challenging the conventions of behaviour. Attractive women receive so much attention daily that they very rarely need to work hard to get more. When a man approaches a woman but refrains from behaviour that is paramount to fawning over her — complimenting her on every aspect of her appearance and personality — the response of many women is to return to their familiar state and prove that they are worthy of the attention. Some women, states The Mystery Method, will go to very great lengths to feel this sense of validation, up to and including going home with you.
Unlike some other related books, The Mystery Method is a relatively dry read. Some authors inject a lot of humour and anecdotes into their recipes for landing women, but Chris Odom is not one of them. Instead, he fills his text with math, graphs and charts.
The Mystery Method is less an art than a science, suggesting that over time it can work for all but the most hopeless of men. While he frequently writes on the nature of love, it is quite clear that his methods and results are anything but love. While there’s nothing wrong with that, this book is not going to help out the man trying to win over the love of his life. Instead, it is better suited for the guy who has worked his method a lot and failed more often than he should have.
A major drawback of The Mystery Method, however, is its failure to address the emotional side of picking up women. While he suggests frequently smiling, claiming that no man who does not smile goes home with women, he does not address concepts like laughing, flirty, speaking with passion, and theories of fulfilment.
Instead, the strategy and the endgame are abstract and straightforward, with little deviance from point A to point B. This is a flaw of The Mystery Method since some women respond to emotion more favourably than others (regardless of their physical features), and some women may be turned off by a man who cannot reveal even the slightest of details about his self in a casual environment.
Ultimately, The Mystery Method is a book that many men unhappy about their love life should read. It challenges much conventional wisdom and offers a template for success that anyone can follow. This is no text for a happy marriage or a long-term partnership, but it never suggests that it is. Instead, as the front page reads, it is a way to land women who would otherwise seem far out of reach.