Just be yourself

When it comes to attracting women, the advise that is often thrown around is to “Just be yourself.” This is very poorly worded good advise. What they should be saying is to keep a consistent internal state, don't try so hard, and keep a strong frame. All of this can be interpreted as being yourself, but if you are a person who by nature tries hard to please, changes their internal state to meet others expectations, and tends to get pulled into other peoples frames, than you will validly interpret this advise as the staying the course which is not what the adviser meant, and not a good idea.

To better illustrate what I mean by keeping a consistent internal state, not trying so hard, and keeping a strong frame, consider the following example. When I was in college, I lived in a dorm that housed 32 guys. The floor was not divided up between age groups, so every year the seniors (hopefully) graduated, and a new batch of freshmen came in. And every year the freshmen were largely intolerable socially for the entire first semester, and about half of the second semester. The reason is that they came in all doe eyed, so eager to please, and so afraid that they would not make any friends. They would laugh heartily at every joke anyone told no matter how unfunny the joke, or how God awful the delivery.  They would listen enthralled to any story, be up for any activity, and never let on what was really going through their heads. One of my friends and I were really into the card game bridge, and decided to teach some of the new freshmen how to play. We played regularly with them for that whole first year. It was not till a whole 2 years later that we found out that they dreaded every minuet of it. There was even one occasion where two of them saw us coming and one pulled the other into the stairwell where they hid under the stairs till we passed by. I only heard about this nearly 2 years after it happened.   

This is the way that we tend interact with all new people (hopefully not to that extent), especially with men who are meeting new women. The issue stems from the fact that with new people we don't have any past validation of their interest in us or affection. So say you meet someone new and excitedly ask them if they want to go to a haunted house for Halloween and they say “Aren't haunted houses for kids?” To “be yourself” is to keep your state by remaining excited, not getting mopy about them insinuating that your a child, by not fall into their frame that haunted houses are for kids, and for gods sake by not being try hard and saying “Ok, than we can do something else! Anything else! I would do anything to be with you! please love me”.  In short, don't be like a doe eyed college freshman so eager to please, and so needing to be loved and accepted.