Girls have shit going on in their lives, tons of it.  They’ve got a dance class tonight (wait, it is Tuesday right?), one of their girlfriends needs emotional support, twenty orbiters are texting them to go out, they lost their cell phone, their mom is sick, they’re emotional about something today (well everything), they’re supposed to meet with their work friends tonight for a drink, and to top it all off their vagina is spraying chunks of blood and yeast everywhere six times a day.

Add to all this that you just asked them out and they’ll have to get ready, put an outfit on, and look their best, and all of this can get overwhelming for a girl.  What the hell should she do?  She does want to hangout with you (you think), but there’s just so much shit to deal with and handle.  Sometimes the best decision available to her is to put you on the back-burner until she knows exactly what to do about all this mess.  The only problem with this is that you have your own shit going on too and you don’t want to feel like you’re second best to her shit.  So when you’re in the process of getting put on the back burner, what can you do to still get the girl without feeling low value or developing a pattern that will lead to her not respecting you?

Before we can talk about the solutions to all of this, let’s try and understand the problem a bit better by talking about what the back burner looks like.  For starters, getting “back-burnered” is anytime you ask a girl out and she makes you wait for her decision on whether or not she’s going to hang out with you.  This could mean she says she’s no to you until something changes with her personal situation, it could mean she’s not sure yet about going out and has to check on something first, and it could even mean she says yes to you but has something else first and will “Let you know when it’s over.”  To be a little more clear, anytime you feel like you’re waiting on the girl for a decision, make no mistake you’re on her back burner.  

When dealing with a situation where i’m back-burnered, i’ll often walk a fine line of decision.  Should I let myself get put on the back-burner and risk my value in hopes that things will work out or is it a better option to take back my invite and push the girl away a bit to guard my value?  To me this decision boils down to three things:  my mood, my options, and my previous experience with the girl (in that order).  

To understand this better I’d like to show you guys an example of me getting back-burnered last night and talk about my decision making process.  The girl in question is one I had sex with once a few weeks before new years with.  She’s serious with another guy so i’d just like to have a fuck-buddy type of thing on the side with her, probably not more.  I thought it would have been nice to have sex with her so I texted her around 8pm.  

Me:  Hey stranger (yes this text is boring.  Remember we’ve already hooked up so I don’t need to put forth a ton of effort.  At this point she either wants to have sex again or she doesn’t).  

Her:  Hey!  How’s it going?

Me:  Great, I just got back from relaxing a few days in Vegas.  You?

Her:  I’m making meat pies.  It just got a little crazy

Me:  What does that mean exactly?

Her:  There was a whole bunch going on in the kitchen.  What are you up to this fine evening?

Me:  Not too much really, relaxing mostly.  You?… besides meatballs of course

Her:  Meat PIES.  Pies, man.  I think I have to go to (random chicken restaurant trendy place that turns into a bar at night) later.  I don’t really love it there.

Me:  Ok ok, pies made of meat.  Got it :).  Well if you’ve got any time tonight it’d be cool to meetup

Her:  I’ll let ya know when i’m done with this cooking eating and stuff.  

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So, in this situation I got put on the back burner when the girl said “I’ll let ya know” and I chose to not respond and see if she texted later on.  She didn’t, and I fell asleep at midnight. 

Why did I make the decision to let myself be on the back-burner last night?  Remember, to me this decision boils down to three things:  my mood, my options, and my previous experience with the girl in that order.  Let’s talk about all three.  

1.  My mood.  

Yesterday I got back from a 4-day trip to Vegas and though I was mildly burnt out from bottle service and seeing LMFAO at Marquee the night before, I haven’t drank at all this year yet so I had some energy and thought it’d be nice to have this girl over and have sex with her.  Since I haven’t seen, texted, or talked to the girl in three weeks I wanna re-establish this soon before it’s too late.  In this case i’ve got a free pass because of the holidays and new year, but in general three weeks or a month without talking and texting would be the death of things.  Overall, I felt like it would be nice to have her over and have some sex, but I wouldn’t have been broken hearted if it didn’t happen.  

2.  My options.  

With one of my main girls in Vegas (she left for Vegas the day I got back), one at work and unavailable, one an hour away that I don’t feel like driving to after 5 hours on the road already yesterday, and others with other random situations, this girl was my best option for the night.  She’s close to me and she’s chill and relaxed (the same mood I was in).  If she didn’t meet up with me, I had other options too.  I could hang out with a hurting but chipper friend (this is what ended up happening.  This is obviously higher priority than this girl but since he wasn’t feeling the best I knew he wouldn’t hangout for long cause he needed rest).  I  could also just chill with my room mate, watch some Netflix, or play some Call of Duty MW3.  In addition to all of this, I had a social circle girl ask me to come hangout at a bar with her and a friend who i’m working on having sex with possibly in the future, but for this specific night this seemed to me like it would take a lot of effort that I wasn’t willing to put forth.  

3.  My previous experience with this girl

This girl hasn’t done anything like this before with me, so quite frankly there’s no pattern of behavior that could influence my choice to hangout or call it off for the night with her.  If this girl had done this before to me, I would definitely choose to push her away a little bit to disrupt any possibility of this back-burnering becoming a habit.  

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With all of these things in mind, I decided my best option was to just let the girl text me back if she decided to.  Yes I was risking the girl thinking I was a bit low value, but in this case it didn’t matter to me whether or not we hung out or I just stayed at home and enjoyed a relaxing evening, so I rolled the dice. 

So why didn’t the girl hangout with me?  To figure out what happened and why, it’s important to understand things from the girl’s point of view.  

For starters, i’m dealing with a girl here who has a serious guy she’s with who I think she might even live with.  For that reason there are going to be a number of times she’d probably like to hangout with me but simply won’t be able to because her relationship will take precedence over her fuck buddies most often.  If this is the case, she will feel like she wants to hangout with me but since she can’t she’ll want to let me down as easily as possible.  She does this because guys can often act negatively when they feel back-burnered.  Some will even get bitter enough to never hang out with a girl again for whatever reason (and she obviously doesn’t want that at all).  In addition to this, most guys couldn’t handle the truth of the situation, so she can’t just tell me outright because we haven’t developed that type of open communication yet.  Wanting to guard a man’s emotions and simultaneously not believing a man can handle the truth is often a reason girls will tell guys that they’ve got something going on when really they’re already committed to spending time with another guy.  In my book that’s a respectable thing for a girl to do for me.   

The other possibility (and probably the more likely one in this case) is that she really is going to that bar and she just doesn’t know whether or not she’ll be able to get out of there for whatever reason.  Again here her intentions are good.  She would like to hangout with me and possibly will, she just doesn’t know whether or not she’ll get caught up in whatever is happening so instead of committing and pissing me off when she flakes out, it’s a better option for her to tell me she might be able to hangout so that if her night sucks and she does have the chance to escape, she can text me and it’s on.  If this was the case for last night, she probably just got caught up in the night, couldn’t leave, now feels a bit bad that it didn’t work out, and will probably try to text me now that we’ve re-established some contact and she knows i’d like to hangout again (by the way, if you haven’t figured it out yet, the literal translation for “hangout” is fuck).  

The third possibility that can happen when I ask a girl out and she back-burners me is that she really doesn’t like me and just wants me to go away.  After reading the above options, can you see how it’s not very likely that this is the case in my scenario above?  Oftentimes as guys we can tend to get fearful that this option is the case when the reality is that it’s most often the least likely scenario.  

The only way you should believe a girl wants you to go away is if most of the following criterion are met:

1.  You haven’t had sex with her yet – if you’ve had sex already with a girl and then you get back-burnered, it’s highly unlikely that the girl wants you to go away.  To have this happen the sex would have to be horrific, because girls understand that sex is often awkward the first time.  Even if the sex was bad, it was probably worse in your head then it was to her.  She did like you enough to have sex.  

2.  There is a pattern of this girl putting you on the back-burner.  In other words, if you’ve seen the same back-burnering technique more than twice from the same girl.

3.  Her excuses are bland – if a girl wants you to go away she’ll say things like “I have plans” instead of something more detailed like “I’m going to sky bar with Lucy and Donna.” 

4.  There is no explanation of what her “plans” are and no attempts at future plans – When a girl wants you to go away you won’t see her say something like “I would but…” or “How about X day?”  or “let’s do something soon though.”  I’m not saying here that the girl has to ask you out, i’m just saying that often you’ll see some type of hint (albeit small sometimes) that she’s not against future plans.  This communicates that she does want to see you, tonight or the night you’re asking about just doesn’t work for whatever reason (and she tells you the reason).

5.  Her texting won’t have emotion – When a girl wants you to go away forever and get the hint that she doesn’t like you, she won’t text things like “I’m sooo sorry!  I had X happen”  or “don’t be mad” or even “sorry.”  If you’re a low value guy to her, she won’t have emotion when she denies you.   

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Switching gears here, let’s talk about what i’ll do when i’m in a scenario where i’m back-burnered for a second time.  Let’s pretend that a week from now the girl from the above example does the same thing to me.  Now it’s time for me to step up and take more aggressive action.  I certainly don’t want to make this bullshit a habit, so this time since her attempt at the back-burner looks like an attempt to push me away, this time i’ll push her away instead and opt for communication at a different time.  When I do this, I mirror her level of pushing.  More explicitly, let’s say she texts me this time and I suspect i’m about to get back-burnered without a callback later in the night:

Her:  “I’ll let you know when i’m done with this thing” or “i’ll call you when it’s over”   

In this case I would text her with a nonchalant attitude that this whole thing is no big deal and then my plan would be not to contact her for a few days.  When I do this, she’ll feel some sense of loss and fear that she might be losing me, and that emotion will cause her to reach out to me and chase a bit.  When this happens, our meetup has a much higher likelihood of happening, so I like this as an option.  To elicit this whole behavior, my text would look like this:

Me:  No worries.  Just do your thing tonight and we’ll talk later maybe.

Can you see how subtle and confusing this is?  Am I telling her to do her thing tonight alone and we’ll talk later on in the week or am I telling her that she can still talk to me later tonight?  The state of subtle confusion is often a great place to put a girl because her subsequent action will tell you where she stands with you.  Also, when I use the word “maybe” i’m communicating that I may not talk to her later at all.  Confusion game this strong could even elicit a higher likelihood of her calling me that very night because of the same fear of loss I mentioned earlier.  Another text you could go with would be one where you backburner her in response, something of almost a double-flake reversal, but this time a double-backburner reversal, like:

Me:  Actually I’ve got some friends heading out to X bar i’m going to head out with, so if I can meet up later i’ll text you. 

If I do this text i’ll plan on not texting the girl at all that night.  Sending the above text will often cause her to text you later on in the night, and when that happens you’ve got the option of seeing her or just not responding to her text at all (aka dead-airing her).

My recommendation is if you wanna fuck her that night to make her work for it a bit more before you to meet up and if you don’t then just dead air her and wait a couple days to text her or until she chases a bit and texts you.  So if she’s like “Hey, i’m done with my shit” and I decide I wanna fuck her, i’d text her something like “Ohhhhh, now you wanna meetup huh?”  When she says “Yes!” i’d text her something like “Okay, tell me how sexy I am and maybe just maybe I will.”  Her response at this point isn’t important, what’s important is that you’ve labeled her behavior and now that she’s complying with you, her behavior is far less likely to happen in the future, so no matter what she says at that point just go into something like “Cool, well head over to my place and i’ll meet you in like 15.”  Done.

In the same manner as above, another tool in my arsenal is to back-burner a girl without her ever having done it to me.  I’ll do this in scenarios where a girl texts me and she’s my second or third option so I can’t commit to something until I know about my first option.  Sometimes this back-burnering can be me just not responding to her pinging text (a pinging text is something like “Hey!” or “What’s up with you tonight?” or whatever).  Regardless, i’ll use the opposite of the rules 1-5 above to show the girl beyond reasonable doubt that I would like to see her.  In other words:

1.  I won’t make a pattern by back-burnering her more than once (unless I do want her do get the hint)

2.  I’ll make my excuses reasonably detailed

3.  I might make an attempt at future plans or at least i’ll leave the future possibilities open (not only in my head but to her by using something in my text)

4.  My texting will always have exaggerated texting emotions or fun quippy shit to show approval to her and calibrate my negative action with something positive – This means I include something like “I prooooomise!” or “Pinky Swear ;)” or “Pretty pretty please?!?”  You can also use emoticons liberally for this.

Sometimes I’ll even pour on all of the above stuff at times if I feel i’ve been neglecting a girl for far too long and I don’t want to lose her because of it.  Just for a head check here and reference for you guys, remember these techniques (of seeing a girl when you want to and back-burnering her when you don’t) both fit into my overall plan to see a girl once a week on average until 4-6 months into things.

Now that we’ve discussed all of these techniques, observations, and scenarios thoroughly, can you see how in my situation last night it’s glaringly obvious that this girl would like to see me again even though she didn’t call or text after putting me on the back-burner?  By examining what her point of view is and understanding her situation, i’m able to make realistic conclusions about our status that will allow us to keep enjoying each other instead of making the obvious crass choice to believe that I must be a low value guy or that “this bitch is just crazy” or whatever ill-thought-out actions I might take that could damage my own self-worth or guard me from the truth about what reality is.  In the future when you get back-burnered for whatever reason, I’d encourage you to take a step back and try to put yourself in the girl’s shoes instead of immediately jumping to false conclusions.  Information is key.  When you listen to reality and empathize with the woman you might just find out that she’s simply taking the best option available to her in her given situation, and with any luck and the right attitude the next time her best option could be you.