Plate Theory

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 various sites in the PUA community, men are taught to emulate 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 have an apptitude for it. 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 things 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 irresistible 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 citing 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 pre-constructed social high-ground.

The way to circumvent this dynamic is brutal honesty and a commitment 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.