Pay Attention

Most guys are terrible at this. I don’t mean in theory - I mean most real guys. They’re confidently, completely incompetent, and almost none of them know it.

They come at it like they’re operating machinery. No sense of touch, no awareness of what she’s experiencing as opposed to what they’re imagining. They find what might be the right spot and immediately attack it like they’re working with a power tool. Meanwhile she’s uncomfortable, checked out, waiting for him to finish and being nice about it. She’ll never tell him.

So he just keeps doing it the same way forever, convinced he figured it out, when really he got somebody patient.

The thing is, almost nobody learns to pay attention to another person. You don’t get taught. You get rumors from friends and bad information from everywhere else, then you wing it, sure you know because you’ve done it before.

The rare guys who figure out there’s something to notice - that it matters how you touch someone, that there’s a real difference between her tensing defensively and her responding to you - those guys are exceptions. Everyone else just runs the same script, confident and wrong.

It’s not hard. You just have to feel what’s happening instead of going through motions. Notice when something shifts. Care enough to notice whether it’s working.

When a guy pays attention, when he develops even basic sensitivity to what’s happening in the moment, everything’s different. She’s present. She’s vulnerable. You can feel her there with you. That’s the version most guys never get to see, because they’re too sure they already know.