I. INTRODUCTION
Upon request by a few forum members, I wrote a datasheet on how I game as a deaf guy. It was not an easy task because it forced me to think about 1) what I was doing on a subconscious level, 2) how I interpret nonverbal communication, and 3) the trial-and-error process that I have been going through my entire life even to this day.
Part of what makes this datasheet so hard to write is that so much of it is about nonverbal communication. Being deaf forces me to become skilled at reading and interpreting nonverbal communication more so than most people. There is a reason it doesn’t get discussed much in the game forums; it’s very difficult to explain via text across the Internet. But I will do my best. Do understand that I am in no way an expert at game, nor do I claim to be one, even in light of my recent success in the Philippines.
In this datasheet, I’ll start with my own personal history, game experience with regards to dissecting body language and nonverbal communication as well as inner game. Then, in the most difficult part of creating this datasheet, I will write practical and relevant advice for you forum members to the best of my ability.
While reading this sheet, it’s important to keep in mind that every deaf and hard-of-hearing person is different, with different backgrounds, education, and extent of hearing loss. These differences take a large part in shaping who they are and how they interact with their surroundings, and yes, their game.
You can skip ahead to the practical section if you want, but I recommend reading the whole sheet to gain a solid background understanding behind the practical part, as my game tips are interspersed throughout the main section about my game experience. To make this lengthy reading easily digestible, I’ve broken it down into sections and sub-sections that flow from one to the next.
II. MY STORY
When I was two years old, I contracted pneumococcal meningitis with a high fever that permanently damaged my hearing. I’m lucky to be alive as it has a high mortality rate even with speedy treatment. Soon after, I was diagnosed with severe to profound hearing loss, and fitted with a hearing aid.
At the time I had gotten sick, I had not yet learned how to talk so my developmental progress was delayed by about three years. I did not learn how to speak until I was five years old. Even after a full decade of near-daily speech therapy, my voice, while mostly intelligible to fluent English speakers, still has a deaf accent that is obvious to almost all listeners. My deaf accent has had a major negative impact on my inner game - more on this later.
As much as I sometimes denied it, my deafness affected every single aspect of my life. One of the positive effects that give me almost an unfair advantage is that I am much more attuned to nonverbal communication than most of the population. Unfortunately, to offset that positive, the most negative effect is, obviously, my inability to absorb potentially valuable information from my surroundings through auditory means. This meant that I could not learn social etiquette and unwritten rules unless someone explained it directly to me.
That is, until the Internet came along. More specifically, when the sexually frustrated men of the world started to coalesce their knowledge and observations into the early game forums. This was when I, in college at the time, began to really pick up sorely needed BASIC social skills. I admittedly put the cart before the horse, trying to game women into bed before practicing the most basic of social skills. The results were sometimes hilarious (in hindsight only, not at THE time), and other times, downright disastrous.
III. MY DEAF GAME EXPERIENCE
It’s All in the Eyes
Because I could not hear and I did not possess full language until later, I became heavily reliant on reading body language in order to interpret what’s going on around me. What I’ve looked at the most was people’s faces, particularly their eyes. A person’s eyes gave me the most information about that person than anything else.
I remember an example of such observation I made at a neighborhood potluck party when I was about 12. I was so bored because there was no one to play with, and I had no idea what anyone was talking about. But I could glean some interesting, even salacious, observations just by reading people’s eyes and their body language.
One woman had her arm wrapped around her husband’s hip, but kept gazing over her shoulder. I followed her gaze, and saw another couple, of which the man was uninterested in his group’s conversation. He kept looking back at the first woman, with his body slightly tilted away from his wife towards that woman. Even when both kept averting their gaze, I could tell there seemed to be a connection between them. At the time I was young and naive, and didn’t put 2 and 2 together. But looking back it was obvious what was going on, and I didn’t need my hearing to figure it out.
As you can imagine, reading a person by looking at their eyes, eye movements, and their context-rich facial expressions surrounding their eyes, can give you potentially vast amounts of information thus giving you an edge when applying game.
Plus, the eyes never lie. Good actors can fake happiness or indifference while angry, but their eyes will always give away their true emotions. Every time.
Lipreading
Before I get into other aspects of my game experience, I want to bring up a couple points about lipreading. It is a tough skill that can only be attained by years or decades of practice, and even then, we don’t always get it right. Here’s a fun statistic: only 30% of the English language is technically lipread-able. We have to guess the rest using context, body language, nonverbal communication, and residual hearing, if any.
Some people’s lips are very easy to read, and no major adjustments to my game are needed for those people because conversation flows almost naturally. Other people’s lips are virtually impossible to read, either due to an accent, or just the movement of their lips, or lack of, like a ventriloquist.
Another point about reading lips, is that it is mentally taxing. Imagine the concentration needed for reading lips day in, day out, 24/7 with no rest, sometimes in high-stake situations where one wrong response can cost you a notch, a friendship, or even a job. I’ve personally lost potential notches because of this, and I’ve known a couple of deaf people who lost their jobs because they pretended to understand what their boss was saying when they really didn’t. So, the concentration required for reading lips may come across as INTENSE to the other person.
This intensity is a double edged sword that I need to be careful with. It can easily scare the cat when gaming new women. In fact, just the right amount of intensity actually works to my advantage. If the girl is attracted to me, it can excite her, priming her for my taking. Too much or too little is not good, and there is a very narrow area in between. Too much makes her uncomfortable or creeped out; too little won’t give her any excitement and I won’t be understanding anything she is saying.
At this point in my game experience, I can confidently say that I know how to find the right balance for eye contact in most cases - this will be discussed further down in this post.
Inner Game
Personally, inner game has always been a difficult nut to crack. In fact, this is the single biggest factor holding me back in game. All the above talk about knowing how to read body language and people’s eyes goes out the window when I’m too much inside my head about my own insecurities and not paying attention to the other person.
One of my biggest insecurities is my voice. As mentioned, I have a deaf accent when I speak, and the insecurity is the thought that it makes me sound retarded and that it turned women off. It does NOT matter whether it is factually true or not. It is THE insecurity, deep in my brain, that sometimes holds me back from actually approaching that cute girl buying her coffee at a cafe. It sometimes holds me back from speaking up during a staff meeting when an important point needs to be brought up. Remove that insecurity, and I make the approach. I speak up in the meeting.
This inner game is a daily struggle that will never end. However, as evidenced in my recent trip to the Philippines, some of my deeply rooted limiting beliefs got absolutely SHATTERED like a sledgehammer to a glass house. Many women, with their English proficiency levels slightly below fluency, could not understand me when I spoke. We used pen and pad most of the time, as well as body language, gestures, and mild mannerisms. Despite this, or because of this, I got high notch counts during the trip.
One of the major elements of my inner game is the new evidentially supported belief that my deafness or deaf accent does NOT stop women from sleeping with me. Another belief, also evidentially supported in my experience, is that women want dick and I am there to give it to them with the least amount of bullshit. Oftentimes, verbal game runs the risk of introducing too much bullshit or unnecessary complications for a deaf guy like me. It’s best to rely on nonverbal cues and gradually escalating kino, in which a deaf person has an advantage.
With verbal game, it’s easy to “fake it until you make it”. Inner game is far more difficult to fake, because it goes much deeper than most of us are consciously aware. For example, it’s easy for me to stand in the mirror and give myself a rah-rah pep talk: “Hey!!! I’m the prize, dammit! I’m deaf and I’m proud of it! I am the PRIZE!” while beating my chest like Tarzan. However, this does not produce lasting changes within inner game, because realistically, in some situations my deafness is a disadvantage, while in other situations it is an advantage. This brings me to my next important topic - Frame.
Frame
Frame from a deaf person’s point of view can simply involve telling a hearing person how to communicate with them. Sometimes I find myself telling people, “I’m deaf and read lips, so please directly face me when you talk”, or “I’m deaf, so can you please write down what you just said” and had over the pen and pad. Often times, however, it goes much deeper than that.
Deaf game is more about finding advantageous situations and favorable logistics, than trying to spit the best possible verbal game like being cocky and funny, using the right neg or an AMOG quip in a group. Deaf game requires foresight and drawing upon past experiences to avoid disadvantageous situations, and leading the girl and myself into the most advantageous situations where I can thrive. This comes down to venue selection, appropriate lighting (warm and low lighting is best, but not too dark that I can’t lipread), lower noise levels, away from crowds, staying out of group conversations, and into ideal situations where I can isolate and escalate ASAP.
An example of a disadvantageous situation for a deaf person like me is night game. The fact that most girls are in sets in nighttime venues begs group game like the Mystery Method, for example. This puts me at a technical disadvantage because I can only lipread one person at a time. I cannot follow group conversations in their entirety, even with family or friends. Add the noise and flashing disco lights, it becomes impossible to have a conversation. I’ve tried fighting through this by using a pen and pad to talk to girls inside a nightclub. While I got a bit of mileage out of this, it rarely panned out into actual notches. Then the only option remaining is dance floor caveman game. I did that, too, and it was fun for about a year or two in my early twenties. Got a couple of club makeouts, and almost got a bathroom bang on a New Years Eve nightclub blowout. I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s quite difficult, and the older I get, the less appealing this option becomes.
I get far, far more mileage out of one-on-one conversations, whether we meet during day game or from online. I have a huge advantage in one-on-one’s. I can calibrate the right intensity to use when lipreading the person, and in effect, I can make the person feel like she is the only one in the room. I’ve heard that Bill Clinton also does the same thing. The name of Deaf Game Frame is One-on-One. This means that my frame is that I do whatever I can to obtain a one-on-one with a girl, and I keep it that way until we have been dating for some time.
Eye Contact
I’ve only recently become aware of this on a full conscious level during my trip to the Philippines. When I was too intense while making an effort to read their lips, they would say “why are you staring?” There, I learned to break eye contact every once in a while to mitigate the intensity while reading her lips. If I don’t break eye contact every so often, they begin to feel uncomfortable, so I am just realizing the importance of breaking eye contact when gaming a girl.
This also applies to gaming Western women because it is hard to feign disinterest when I am concentrating on reading her lips. Breaking eye contact every so often can help me feign slight disinterest, which works to, at minimum, get the cat comfortable, and at maximum, get her wondering whether I like her. If I don’t break eye contact with a Western woman with artificially inflated SMV, my lipreading efforts will unfortunately come off as needy or desperate.
A hard intense gaze while lipreading is softened by non-threatening gestures, soft smiles, nice mannerisms, and using a pen and pad. This creates just enough tension and excitement, as has been my experience with Filipinas. I imagine with Western women, more lean-back body language and more eye contact breaks, and have them invest by writing on pen and pad as per my request.
Using Kino
Personally, I look for any and every opening to initiate or escalate kino. As I am gaming women in a one-on-one situation, I set up the situation such that we are sitting next to each other, not across. I start touching their forearms or on the small of their back, and as they write on pen and pad, I stroke up and down their spine or touch them on their thighs. Note I don’t do it just out of the blue, I do it when it’s natural to do it. I am always looking for these openings, like a patient running back waiting for his blockers to open a gap and then punching through when one does open.
Because I am deaf, I tend to miss a lot of verbal communication. Even though it makes up only 7% of all communication, it is an important 7%, without which limits my game. So, I find ways to compensate by using more kino, more gestures, isolating sooner and escalating faster. I personally like touching her arm upon finishing a gesture, with an expectant “comprende?” look. I find that using kino, starting lightly and slowly ramping up over time, is like putting girls on a slow-cooker because it communicates that I’m into her without using stupid or cheesy lines. It’s exactly like what Rollo Tomassi says: don’t tell, show her. Demonstrate, not explicate. And once you get the feeling that they are warm enough, isolate to get the notch. If she’s not quite there yet, she will give LMR. Standard LMR tactics apply, deaf or not. Sometimes instead of saying “we shouldn’t do this”, I gesture by shaking my head, with palms facing outward in a slightly defensive and non-threatening pose.
Sometimes I even give compliments accompanied by kino. For example, with a Filipina, I tell her “maganda ka” while stroking a strand of hair off her forehead to the side and then behind her ear, with my index finger gently brushing around the back of her ear. One girl I did this with narrowed her eyes in response, shook her head with a smirk, and said “gwapo”. My response? “Let’s go” and we went to my place. Bang. With Western women, however, I suppose I could use a neg instead of a compliment, while doing exactly the same kino move.
Online Game
I would be remiss to not write about online game. As much as some of you guys hate it or bash it, it has been a boon for a deaf guy like me. Before the days of the Internet, it was impossible for deaf people to date anyone other than other deaf people because they couldn’t talk on the phone. In the old days, you had to approach and get her phone number and then call her. Either deaf men married ugly deaf women, or became gay. Some became celibate.
There was simply no playing field for deaf guys. Hard of hearing guys had somewhat of a chance because they could still make out some words with their impaired hearing, but it was still difficult even for them. Now we have sites like match, cupid, tinder, POF, and many others. Nowadays we don’t even need to call. We simply text. This has evened the playing field for deaf people like me, albeit with an artificially lower SMV for men.
I get laid far, far more from online than from day and night game combined. However, it wasn’t without some trial and error. My main question was WHEN to disclose my deafness. I have tried not disclosing it and letting her find out when she meets me, or disclosing it right in my online profile, and anywhere in between. My feeling today is that it’s best to disclose it in between, neither in the profile, nor waiting until we met in person. It would usually go like this, match on profile, exchange messages in the site, pitch to meet, exchange numbers, and then I disclose before we make specific plans.
Also important is HOW I disclose the fact. Coming right out and saying “I’m deaf”. Boom! It’s a little too much of a shock factor, so I’ve found a way to soften the impact by telling them a story. Starting with pipelining for my Philippines trip, I’d chat with them on skype or viber for a little while. After the work/family/small talk is out of the way, I bring it up with a prompt that goes “I’d like to tell you something about myself.” Once their curiosity is piqued, I tell them the story about how I got sick and nearly died when I was two. I point out that I’m lucky to have survived, but that my hearing was permanently damaged. Then I explain how I communicate by reading lips and using pen and pad, but am also able to speak fairly well. I close this story by saying “so anyway, that’s what I wanted to share with you.”
The responses from Filipinas was overwhelmingly positive. Some outright said that they have no issues with it, and thanked me for telling them. Others got even more curious and asked me questions, not in a hostile way, but that they were genuinely curious and wanted to learn more about me - how I was able to get an education and a job. I tell them that they should feel free to ask me anything about it, so that they feel comfortable with me. Some of them even opened up with their own hardship stories. The only negative response (out of maybe 20-25) was from a Chinese girl who said she didn’t think I would be able to read her lips because she didn’t know English very well.
My hope is that Western women are as receptive to this approach as Filipinas have been. I will try this more here and update my datasheet accordingly.
IV. PRACTICAL ADVICE
Right now, as my cursor flashes right in this spot, I’m sitting here thinking about how to put this. How do I make deaf game relevant, practical, and useable for non-deaf players? The rub in all of this is that much of my deaf game is specific to my personal situation. How do I isolate the parts of deaf game that are scalable to the general population?
I don’t claim to have all the answers, nor am I an expert in any of this. I’m only reflecting from my own experience, from learning how to interpret the world without auditory input from age 2 all the way to my recent Philippines trip.
Anyway, here goes. I’m just going to wing this…
Deaf Game Tip 1: Step Outside of Your Head and Pay Attention
So much of Deaf Game hinges on my own inner game. The only way I am able to capitalize on my intrinsic ability to read people is if I get out of my own head and pay attention. When you approach or game women, find the thing that holds you back the most. Think about it. Why is it holding you back? It’s not deafness, because obviously you’re not deaf. But it could be something else that you’re deeply insecure about.
Think about what happens when you remove that fear. Pretend you’re flicking a switch and your own hamster shuts off. Are you less inside your head, and paying more attention to what’s in front of you? If so, you’ve achieved the first step in making Deaf Game work. When you are paying attention, you are open to receiving a wealth of information coming from the person in front of you without her even saying anything.
Sometimes I have to remind myself to take my own advice. Many of us are so focused on the verbal component of game, what to say next in this approach, what’s the next DHV story or the right neg to use, and so on, that we get bogged down in our own heads. When we do this, we miss a LOT of information coming from the other person. Useful signals. Cues that you can act on.
This is why we hear so many cringe-worthy stories about guys missing wide open flashing neon signs that the girl wants to fuck right then and there, and the guy doesn’t go for it because he’s stuck in his head. I know, I’ve been there. On the other hand, I think this tip is why I got so many notches in the Philippines. My mind was primed and ready for any cues that they were ready to fuck. My focus was on kino’ing and looking for their nonverbal “green light”, rather than thinking about how to “game” them.
Deaf Game Tip 2: Parlay Your (Perceived) Disadvantage into an Advantage
Sometimes I joke about being deaf. I own the disability instead of trying to deny it. I don’t take it too seriously. Here are some ways I do this:
* Tell girls I like them to wear cherry red lipstick, because since I read lips, it encourages me to pay attention. When telling this in person (more powerful than via text), I pause and purse my lips before saying the words “pay attention”. They think I’m going to say “kiss”. It’s like a little sexually charged tease. It accomplishes two things: 1) I show that I’m comfortable with my deafness, and 2) I sexually charge the interaction. Sometimes, I also do this via online before a date as a compliance test to see if she actually shows up with cherry red lipstick.
* In a playful manner, I play deaf mute and use it as an excuse to initiate kino. Ideally done early on a first date.
* Neg a girl saying she might be the type who snores loudly, but it’s OK because I can’t hear!
* I tell a funny story about how someone in college offered to pay me $40 to lipread a girl he had a crush on, from three tables away in the cafeteria, and relay to him what she was saying to her girlfriends.
* Break a bad habit of apologizing for not being able to understand when spoken to, because it weakens frame. Instead of saying “I’m sorry?”, say “I didn’t quite catch that, write it down” or just hand over pen and pad.
Think about these examples, and how I turn a potential disadvantage into an advantage by flipping the frame into my favor. By now, you should be able to get an idea on what your own personal (perceived) disadvantages are in terms of game, and how to parlay them as an advantage, or at least use it to maintain strong frame.
Deaf Game Tip 3: Set the Tone and the Right Frame Early
The first few plays in a football game is often the most crucial. Well coached teams would often go aggressively for that initial first down early, or take a shot down the field. The first team to make a major play in the game often sets the tone and controls most of the game hereafter.
So it is with game, and it becomes much more important with deaf game. The challenge is to do it without scaring the cat. Approaching with a direct verbal line often scares the cat, however. I’m not sure, however, what usually happens when I write down a direct statement on paper and hand it to the girl after introducing myself. I did this twice in Manila, and notched both of them. We’ll have to see how this works with Western women, so I’ll report back and update this sheet.
Setting the tone is more than just the initial approach. My favorite and most powerful move on a first date is to kiss her cheek upon greeting, with my hand on the small of her back. It’s distinctly sexual and flips a switch in her mind. Your intentions are clear, and that should make the rest of the date easier. Slow-cook her with kino and watch for opportunities to escalate.
Deaf Game Tip 4: Maintain and Break Eye Contact
This may be one of the important deaf game tips in this post, but also the simplest. Eye contact is very, very powerful, and too much of it is like shining a 200 watt flashlight in a person’s face. At the same time, you don’t want to completely avoid eye contact or maintain a minimal amount of it. You do want to maintain the right amount of eye contact with your girl, to build tension and excitement.
To keep her from getting uncomfortable, creeped out, or feeling like she’s being stared at, you want to BREAK eye contact periodically. Look at the menu. Eat a bite of your food. Drink your drink. Pretend to get distracted by someone walking by or some loud talkers at another table. Then obtain eye contact again, and hold. Hold until either she breaks it, or your gut feel tells you it’s time to break. If a girl asks why you’re staring, you know you are doing too much. Tone it down a notch or two.
Sometimes I am needing to maintain eye contact longer than most people because I have to read their lips. So I need to remind myself to break eye contact, by telling her to write down something she said. As I write this, I’m thinking that it’s entirely possible that some guys don’t maintain enough eye contact to begin with. For these guys, they could try increasing the amount of time they maintain eye contact with the girl they’re with. As soon as it gets slightly uncomfortable, or you feel some tension - break.
Keep in mind you’re not trying to win a staredown contest or establish dominance. If she’s on a first date with you and you are kino’ing her, you’ve already established dominance and there’s no need to win staredown contests. What you are trying to accomplish is to get her to feel some tension with you via eye contact, but not so much that she gets uncomfortable. It’ll take some experimentation to get it down to the right amount, and once you do, I suspect that the girls you’re with will be tingling with sexual tension and going to want a release very soon.
Deaf Game Tip 5: Start Kino As Soon As Possible
I find that delaying kino is often the kiss of death. Even though sitting directly across from each other is the most ideal for lip-reading, I hate doing that when on a date. If we somehow get into that situation, I tell her “you’re too far away, I can’t read your lips from here, we need to sit next to each other.” You could modify this for yourselves and say “you’re too far away, I can’t hear you, we need to sit next to each other.”
If done right, it makes gaming her so much easier. You won’t need to pull out a whole bunch of DHV stories or sexualize the conversation. With kino started very early and slowly ramping up over time, you can have a PG conversation with a strong sexual undercurrent. Every minute kino is delayed, it becomes twice as difficult. If the girl is REALLY into you, she will initiate kino with you if you don’t within the first 2 or 3 minutes of a first date. Most girls won’t do this though, as you are expected to make the first move.
Note I’m not saying kiss her in public. I actually prefer not to until bringing her to my place, or at least isolating her for the notch. Credit to Tuthmosis’s first date bang recipe for that particular tip, and it would probably interest you to know that I did not kiss any of my Filipina notches until I got them to my place.
The itty-gritty particulars of kino I’ll try to break down in order as a storyline: 1) First kiss her on the cheek, and then 2) guide her to where you’ll sit by putting your hand on the small of her back. 3) Tell her to sit a little closer to you, and lightly touch her forearm, or 4) accidentally brush the back of your hand on the anterior of her thigh. Talk some, gesture some, and 5) end each gesture with a hand on her upper arm, forearm, thigh anterior, or shoulder, whichever comes naturally. Rinse, repeat. 6) Ask her to write on pen and pad, and put hand on her back as she leans in to write. If she doesn’t recoil, then start stroking up and down her back, or put your hand on her thigh. 7) When she says something funny, one arm hug her and say “you funny girl, you!” 8) Keep your arm around her and stroke your hand on her opposite shoulder and upper arm. 9) Start holding her hand, and if she holds it back, you have a pretty good chance. 10) When it’s time, the drinks are finished, tapas plates are cleaned up, pay the bill, and take her hand and go somewhere else. Either venue change or your place. 11) At your place, stand close to her, stroke a strand of hair off her forehead and behind her ear while looking in her eyes, and then 12) kiss her. From there, take clothes off and go for the notch, deal with LMR accordingly.
V. EXPERIMENT
Sometimes we read great posts on game forums, but we don’t really absorb the information fully. To help you absorb what I wrote, what I’d propose is that you undertake an experiment. Of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to. But if you want to try this, you can do the following:
* Buy ear plugs.
* Go about a regular day with ear plugs in to see what it’s like being deaf or hard of hearing.
* Pay attention to how you ADAPT.
* Go on a date with a girl as a “deaf” guy, wearing ear plugs. (Tell her what you’re up to - you’re doing an experiment on what it’s like being deaf.)
Disclaimer: Please do this at your own risk, and watch out for cars! If anything happens to you while doing this experiment, I will not be held liable.
Think about the following, and please report back:
* How do you adapt or modify your behavior / game?
* Did you use less or more verbal game? More or less kino?
* Did you notice a heightened sensitivity and awareness to nonverbal communication and body language cues? If so, how? Observe what she is communicating to you without words.
* Do you think that if you maintained heightened sensitivity to nonverbal cues AFTER the experiment, with normal hearing, that it can help your game? Why or why not?
Please note this isn’t about seeing how hard it is being deaf, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested to see how you, personally, adapt to everyday situations without adequate auditory input. If you get good/better results during or after this experiment, please report back in this thread as it could be something we can all learn from, myself included.
I know this was long! Thanks for bearing with me. I hope we together can all learn something from this. I know I have a lot to learn, myself.
Upon request by a few forum members, I wrote a datasheet on how I game as a deaf guy. It was not an easy task because it forced me to think about 1) what I was doing on a subconscious level, 2) how I interpret nonverbal communication, and 3) the trial-and-error process that I have been going through my entire life even to this day.
Part of what makes this datasheet so hard to write is that so much of it is about nonverbal communication. Being deaf forces me to become skilled at reading and interpreting nonverbal communication more so than most people. There is a reason it doesn’t get discussed much in the game forums; it’s very difficult to explain via text across the Internet. But I will do my best. Do understand that I am in no way an expert at game, nor do I claim to be one, even in light of my recent success in the Philippines.
In this datasheet, I’ll start with my own personal history, game experience with regards to dissecting body language and nonverbal communication as well as inner game. Then, in the most difficult part of creating this datasheet, I will write practical and relevant advice for you forum members to the best of my ability.
While reading this sheet, it’s important to keep in mind that every deaf and hard-of-hearing person is different, with different backgrounds, education, and extent of hearing loss. These differences take a large part in shaping who they are and how they interact with their surroundings, and yes, their game.
You can skip ahead to the practical section if you want, but I recommend reading the whole sheet to gain a solid background understanding behind the practical part, as my game tips are interspersed throughout the main section about my game experience. To make this lengthy reading easily digestible, I’ve broken it down into sections and sub-sections that flow from one to the next.
II. MY STORY
When I was two years old, I contracted pneumococcal meningitis with a high fever that permanently damaged my hearing. I’m lucky to be alive as it has a high mortality rate even with speedy treatment. Soon after, I was diagnosed with severe to profound hearing loss, and fitted with a hearing aid.
At the time I had gotten sick, I had not yet learned how to talk so my developmental progress was delayed by about three years. I did not learn how to speak until I was five years old. Even after a full decade of near-daily speech therapy, my voice, while mostly intelligible to fluent English speakers, still has a deaf accent that is obvious to almost all listeners. My deaf accent has had a major negative impact on my inner game - more on this later.
As much as I sometimes denied it, my deafness affected every single aspect of my life. One of the positive effects that give me almost an unfair advantage is that I am much more attuned to nonverbal communication than most of the population. Unfortunately, to offset that positive, the most negative effect is, obviously, my inability to absorb potentially valuable information from my surroundings through auditory means. This meant that I could not learn social etiquette and unwritten rules unless someone explained it directly to me.
That is, until the Internet came along. More specifically, when the sexually frustrated men of the world started to coalesce their knowledge and observations into the early game forums. This was when I, in college at the time, began to really pick up sorely needed BASIC social skills. I admittedly put the cart before the horse, trying to game women into bed before practicing the most basic of social skills. The results were sometimes hilarious (in hindsight only, not at THE time), and other times, downright disastrous.
III. MY DEAF GAME EXPERIENCE
It’s All in the Eyes
Because I could not hear and I did not possess full language until later, I became heavily reliant on reading body language in order to interpret what’s going on around me. What I’ve looked at the most was people’s faces, particularly their eyes. A person’s eyes gave me the most information about that person than anything else.
I remember an example of such observation I made at a neighborhood potluck party when I was about 12. I was so bored because there was no one to play with, and I had no idea what anyone was talking about. But I could glean some interesting, even salacious, observations just by reading people’s eyes and their body language.
One woman had her arm wrapped around her husband’s hip, but kept gazing over her shoulder. I followed her gaze, and saw another couple, of which the man was uninterested in his group’s conversation. He kept looking back at the first woman, with his body slightly tilted away from his wife towards that woman. Even when both kept averting their gaze, I could tell there seemed to be a connection between them. At the time I was young and naive, and didn’t put 2 and 2 together. But looking back it was obvious what was going on, and I didn’t need my hearing to figure it out.
As you can imagine, reading a person by looking at their eyes, eye movements, and their context-rich facial expressions surrounding their eyes, can give you potentially vast amounts of information thus giving you an edge when applying game.
Plus, the eyes never lie. Good actors can fake happiness or indifference while angry, but their eyes will always give away their true emotions. Every time.
Lipreading
Before I get into other aspects of my game experience, I want to bring up a couple points about lipreading. It is a tough skill that can only be attained by years or decades of practice, and even then, we don’t always get it right. Here’s a fun statistic: only 30% of the English language is technically lipread-able. We have to guess the rest using context, body language, nonverbal communication, and residual hearing, if any.
Some people’s lips are very easy to read, and no major adjustments to my game are needed for those people because conversation flows almost naturally. Other people’s lips are virtually impossible to read, either due to an accent, or just the movement of their lips, or lack of, like a ventriloquist.
Another point about reading lips, is that it is mentally taxing. Imagine the concentration needed for reading lips day in, day out, 24/7 with no rest, sometimes in high-stake situations where one wrong response can cost you a notch, a friendship, or even a job. I’ve personally lost potential notches because of this, and I’ve known a couple of deaf people who lost their jobs because they pretended to understand what their boss was saying when they really didn’t. So, the concentration required for reading lips may come across as INTENSE to the other person.
This intensity is a double edged sword that I need to be careful with. It can easily scare the cat when gaming new women. In fact, just the right amount of intensity actually works to my advantage. If the girl is attracted to me, it can excite her, priming her for my taking. Too much or too little is not good, and there is a very narrow area in between. Too much makes her uncomfortable or creeped out; too little won’t give her any excitement and I won’t be understanding anything she is saying.
At this point in my game experience, I can confidently say that I know how to find the right balance for eye contact in most cases - this will be discussed further down in this post.
Inner Game
Personally, inner game has always been a difficult nut to crack. In fact, this is the single biggest factor holding me back in game. All the above talk about knowing how to read body language and people’s eyes goes out the window when I’m too much inside my head about my own insecurities and not paying attention to the other person.
One of my biggest insecurities is my voice. As mentioned, I have a deaf accent when I speak, and the insecurity is the thought that it makes me sound retarded and that it turned women off. It does NOT matter whether it is factually true or not. It is THE insecurity, deep in my brain, that sometimes holds me back from actually approaching that cute girl buying her coffee at a cafe. It sometimes holds me back from speaking up during a staff meeting when an important point needs to be brought up. Remove that insecurity, and I make the approach. I speak up in the meeting.
This inner game is a daily struggle that will never end. However, as evidenced in my recent trip to the Philippines, some of my deeply rooted limiting beliefs got absolutely SHATTERED like a sledgehammer to a glass house. Many women, with their English proficiency levels slightly below fluency, could not understand me when I spoke. We used pen and pad most of the time, as well as body language, gestures, and mild mannerisms. Despite this, or because of this, I got high notch counts during the trip.
One of the major elements of my inner game is the new evidentially supported belief that my deafness or deaf accent does NOT stop women from sleeping with me. Another belief, also evidentially supported in my experience, is that women want dick and I am there to give it to them with the least amount of bullshit. Oftentimes, verbal game runs the risk of introducing too much bullshit or unnecessary complications for a deaf guy like me. It’s best to rely on nonverbal cues and gradually escalating kino, in which a deaf person has an advantage.
With verbal game, it’s easy to “fake it until you make it”. Inner game is far more difficult to fake, because it goes much deeper than most of us are consciously aware. For example, it’s easy for me to stand in the mirror and give myself a rah-rah pep talk: “Hey!!! I’m the prize, dammit! I’m deaf and I’m proud of it! I am the PRIZE!” while beating my chest like Tarzan. However, this does not produce lasting changes within inner game, because realistically, in some situations my deafness is a disadvantage, while in other situations it is an advantage. This brings me to my next important topic - Frame.
Frame
Frame from a deaf person’s point of view can simply involve telling a hearing person how to communicate with them. Sometimes I find myself telling people, “I’m deaf and read lips, so please directly face me when you talk”, or “I’m deaf, so can you please write down what you just said” and had over the pen and pad. Often times, however, it goes much deeper than that.
Deaf game is more about finding advantageous situations and favorable logistics, than trying to spit the best possible verbal game like being cocky and funny, using the right neg or an AMOG quip in a group. Deaf game requires foresight and drawing upon past experiences to avoid disadvantageous situations, and leading the girl and myself into the most advantageous situations where I can thrive. This comes down to venue selection, appropriate lighting (warm and low lighting is best, but not too dark that I can’t lipread), lower noise levels, away from crowds, staying out of group conversations, and into ideal situations where I can isolate and escalate ASAP.
An example of a disadvantageous situation for a deaf person like me is night game. The fact that most girls are in sets in nighttime venues begs group game like the Mystery Method, for example. This puts me at a technical disadvantage because I can only lipread one person at a time. I cannot follow group conversations in their entirety, even with family or friends. Add the noise and flashing disco lights, it becomes impossible to have a conversation. I’ve tried fighting through this by using a pen and pad to talk to girls inside a nightclub. While I got a bit of mileage out of this, it rarely panned out into actual notches. Then the only option remaining is dance floor caveman game. I did that, too, and it was fun for about a year or two in my early twenties. Got a couple of club makeouts, and almost got a bathroom bang on a New Years Eve nightclub blowout. I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s quite difficult, and the older I get, the less appealing this option becomes.
I get far, far more mileage out of one-on-one conversations, whether we meet during day game or from online. I have a huge advantage in one-on-one’s. I can calibrate the right intensity to use when lipreading the person, and in effect, I can make the person feel like she is the only one in the room. I’ve heard that Bill Clinton also does the same thing. The name of Deaf Game Frame is One-on-One. This means that my frame is that I do whatever I can to obtain a one-on-one with a girl, and I keep it that way until we have been dating for some time.
Eye Contact
I’ve only recently become aware of this on a full conscious level during my trip to the Philippines. When I was too intense while making an effort to read their lips, they would say “why are you staring?” There, I learned to break eye contact every once in a while to mitigate the intensity while reading her lips. If I don’t break eye contact every so often, they begin to feel uncomfortable, so I am just realizing the importance of breaking eye contact when gaming a girl.
This also applies to gaming Western women because it is hard to feign disinterest when I am concentrating on reading her lips. Breaking eye contact every so often can help me feign slight disinterest, which works to, at minimum, get the cat comfortable, and at maximum, get her wondering whether I like her. If I don’t break eye contact with a Western woman with artificially inflated SMV, my lipreading efforts will unfortunately come off as needy or desperate.
A hard intense gaze while lipreading is softened by non-threatening gestures, soft smiles, nice mannerisms, and using a pen and pad. This creates just enough tension and excitement, as has been my experience with Filipinas. I imagine with Western women, more lean-back body language and more eye contact breaks, and have them invest by writing on pen and pad as per my request.
Using Kino
Personally, I look for any and every opening to initiate or escalate kino. As I am gaming women in a one-on-one situation, I set up the situation such that we are sitting next to each other, not across. I start touching their forearms or on the small of their back, and as they write on pen and pad, I stroke up and down their spine or touch them on their thighs. Note I don’t do it just out of the blue, I do it when it’s natural to do it. I am always looking for these openings, like a patient running back waiting for his blockers to open a gap and then punching through when one does open.
Because I am deaf, I tend to miss a lot of verbal communication. Even though it makes up only 7% of all communication, it is an important 7%, without which limits my game. So, I find ways to compensate by using more kino, more gestures, isolating sooner and escalating faster. I personally like touching her arm upon finishing a gesture, with an expectant “comprende?” look. I find that using kino, starting lightly and slowly ramping up over time, is like putting girls on a slow-cooker because it communicates that I’m into her without using stupid or cheesy lines. It’s exactly like what Rollo Tomassi says: don’t tell, show her. Demonstrate, not explicate. And once you get the feeling that they are warm enough, isolate to get the notch. If she’s not quite there yet, she will give LMR. Standard LMR tactics apply, deaf or not. Sometimes instead of saying “we shouldn’t do this”, I gesture by shaking my head, with palms facing outward in a slightly defensive and non-threatening pose.
Sometimes I even give compliments accompanied by kino. For example, with a Filipina, I tell her “maganda ka” while stroking a strand of hair off her forehead to the side and then behind her ear, with my index finger gently brushing around the back of her ear. One girl I did this with narrowed her eyes in response, shook her head with a smirk, and said “gwapo”. My response? “Let’s go” and we went to my place. Bang. With Western women, however, I suppose I could use a neg instead of a compliment, while doing exactly the same kino move.
Online Game
I would be remiss to not write about online game. As much as some of you guys hate it or bash it, it has been a boon for a deaf guy like me. Before the days of the Internet, it was impossible for deaf people to date anyone other than other deaf people because they couldn’t talk on the phone. In the old days, you had to approach and get her phone number and then call her. Either deaf men married ugly deaf women, or became gay. Some became celibate.
There was simply no playing field for deaf guys. Hard of hearing guys had somewhat of a chance because they could still make out some words with their impaired hearing, but it was still difficult even for them. Now we have sites like match, cupid, tinder, POF, and many others. Nowadays we don’t even need to call. We simply text. This has evened the playing field for deaf people like me, albeit with an artificially lower SMV for men.
I get laid far, far more from online than from day and night game combined. However, it wasn’t without some trial and error. My main question was WHEN to disclose my deafness. I have tried not disclosing it and letting her find out when she meets me, or disclosing it right in my online profile, and anywhere in between. My feeling today is that it’s best to disclose it in between, neither in the profile, nor waiting until we met in person. It would usually go like this, match on profile, exchange messages in the site, pitch to meet, exchange numbers, and then I disclose before we make specific plans.
Also important is HOW I disclose the fact. Coming right out and saying “I’m deaf”. Boom! It’s a little too much of a shock factor, so I’ve found a way to soften the impact by telling them a story. Starting with pipelining for my Philippines trip, I’d chat with them on skype or viber for a little while. After the work/family/small talk is out of the way, I bring it up with a prompt that goes “I’d like to tell you something about myself.” Once their curiosity is piqued, I tell them the story about how I got sick and nearly died when I was two. I point out that I’m lucky to have survived, but that my hearing was permanently damaged. Then I explain how I communicate by reading lips and using pen and pad, but am also able to speak fairly well. I close this story by saying “so anyway, that’s what I wanted to share with you.”
The responses from Filipinas was overwhelmingly positive. Some outright said that they have no issues with it, and thanked me for telling them. Others got even more curious and asked me questions, not in a hostile way, but that they were genuinely curious and wanted to learn more about me - how I was able to get an education and a job. I tell them that they should feel free to ask me anything about it, so that they feel comfortable with me. Some of them even opened up with their own hardship stories. The only negative response (out of maybe 20-25) was from a Chinese girl who said she didn’t think I would be able to read her lips because she didn’t know English very well.
My hope is that Western women are as receptive to this approach as Filipinas have been. I will try this more here and update my datasheet accordingly.
IV. PRACTICAL ADVICE
Right now, as my cursor flashes right in this spot, I’m sitting here thinking about how to put this. How do I make deaf game relevant, practical, and useable for non-deaf players? The rub in all of this is that much of my deaf game is specific to my personal situation. How do I isolate the parts of deaf game that are scalable to the general population?
I don’t claim to have all the answers, nor am I an expert in any of this. I’m only reflecting from my own experience, from learning how to interpret the world without auditory input from age 2 all the way to my recent Philippines trip.
Anyway, here goes. I’m just going to wing this…
Deaf Game Tip 1: Step Outside of Your Head and Pay Attention
So much of Deaf Game hinges on my own inner game. The only way I am able to capitalize on my intrinsic ability to read people is if I get out of my own head and pay attention. When you approach or game women, find the thing that holds you back the most. Think about it. Why is it holding you back? It’s not deafness, because obviously you’re not deaf. But it could be something else that you’re deeply insecure about.
Think about what happens when you remove that fear. Pretend you’re flicking a switch and your own hamster shuts off. Are you less inside your head, and paying more attention to what’s in front of you? If so, you’ve achieved the first step in making Deaf Game work. When you are paying attention, you are open to receiving a wealth of information coming from the person in front of you without her even saying anything.
Sometimes I have to remind myself to take my own advice. Many of us are so focused on the verbal component of game, what to say next in this approach, what’s the next DHV story or the right neg to use, and so on, that we get bogged down in our own heads. When we do this, we miss a LOT of information coming from the other person. Useful signals. Cues that you can act on.
This is why we hear so many cringe-worthy stories about guys missing wide open flashing neon signs that the girl wants to fuck right then and there, and the guy doesn’t go for it because he’s stuck in his head. I know, I’ve been there. On the other hand, I think this tip is why I got so many notches in the Philippines. My mind was primed and ready for any cues that they were ready to fuck. My focus was on kino’ing and looking for their nonverbal “green light”, rather than thinking about how to “game” them.
Deaf Game Tip 2: Parlay Your (Perceived) Disadvantage into an Advantage
Sometimes I joke about being deaf. I own the disability instead of trying to deny it. I don’t take it too seriously. Here are some ways I do this:
* Tell girls I like them to wear cherry red lipstick, because since I read lips, it encourages me to pay attention. When telling this in person (more powerful than via text), I pause and purse my lips before saying the words “pay attention”. They think I’m going to say “kiss”. It’s like a little sexually charged tease. It accomplishes two things: 1) I show that I’m comfortable with my deafness, and 2) I sexually charge the interaction. Sometimes, I also do this via online before a date as a compliance test to see if she actually shows up with cherry red lipstick.
* In a playful manner, I play deaf mute and use it as an excuse to initiate kino. Ideally done early on a first date.
* Neg a girl saying she might be the type who snores loudly, but it’s OK because I can’t hear!
* I tell a funny story about how someone in college offered to pay me $40 to lipread a girl he had a crush on, from three tables away in the cafeteria, and relay to him what she was saying to her girlfriends.
* Break a bad habit of apologizing for not being able to understand when spoken to, because it weakens frame. Instead of saying “I’m sorry?”, say “I didn’t quite catch that, write it down” or just hand over pen and pad.
Think about these examples, and how I turn a potential disadvantage into an advantage by flipping the frame into my favor. By now, you should be able to get an idea on what your own personal (perceived) disadvantages are in terms of game, and how to parlay them as an advantage, or at least use it to maintain strong frame.
Deaf Game Tip 3: Set the Tone and the Right Frame Early
The first few plays in a football game is often the most crucial. Well coached teams would often go aggressively for that initial first down early, or take a shot down the field. The first team to make a major play in the game often sets the tone and controls most of the game hereafter.
So it is with game, and it becomes much more important with deaf game. The challenge is to do it without scaring the cat. Approaching with a direct verbal line often scares the cat, however. I’m not sure, however, what usually happens when I write down a direct statement on paper and hand it to the girl after introducing myself. I did this twice in Manila, and notched both of them. We’ll have to see how this works with Western women, so I’ll report back and update this sheet.
Setting the tone is more than just the initial approach. My favorite and most powerful move on a first date is to kiss her cheek upon greeting, with my hand on the small of her back. It’s distinctly sexual and flips a switch in her mind. Your intentions are clear, and that should make the rest of the date easier. Slow-cook her with kino and watch for opportunities to escalate.
Deaf Game Tip 4: Maintain and Break Eye Contact
This may be one of the important deaf game tips in this post, but also the simplest. Eye contact is very, very powerful, and too much of it is like shining a 200 watt flashlight in a person’s face. At the same time, you don’t want to completely avoid eye contact or maintain a minimal amount of it. You do want to maintain the right amount of eye contact with your girl, to build tension and excitement.
To keep her from getting uncomfortable, creeped out, or feeling like she’s being stared at, you want to BREAK eye contact periodically. Look at the menu. Eat a bite of your food. Drink your drink. Pretend to get distracted by someone walking by or some loud talkers at another table. Then obtain eye contact again, and hold. Hold until either she breaks it, or your gut feel tells you it’s time to break. If a girl asks why you’re staring, you know you are doing too much. Tone it down a notch or two.
Sometimes I am needing to maintain eye contact longer than most people because I have to read their lips. So I need to remind myself to break eye contact, by telling her to write down something she said. As I write this, I’m thinking that it’s entirely possible that some guys don’t maintain enough eye contact to begin with. For these guys, they could try increasing the amount of time they maintain eye contact with the girl they’re with. As soon as it gets slightly uncomfortable, or you feel some tension - break.
Keep in mind you’re not trying to win a staredown contest or establish dominance. If she’s on a first date with you and you are kino’ing her, you’ve already established dominance and there’s no need to win staredown contests. What you are trying to accomplish is to get her to feel some tension with you via eye contact, but not so much that she gets uncomfortable. It’ll take some experimentation to get it down to the right amount, and once you do, I suspect that the girls you’re with will be tingling with sexual tension and going to want a release very soon.
Deaf Game Tip 5: Start Kino As Soon As Possible
I find that delaying kino is often the kiss of death. Even though sitting directly across from each other is the most ideal for lip-reading, I hate doing that when on a date. If we somehow get into that situation, I tell her “you’re too far away, I can’t read your lips from here, we need to sit next to each other.” You could modify this for yourselves and say “you’re too far away, I can’t hear you, we need to sit next to each other.”
If done right, it makes gaming her so much easier. You won’t need to pull out a whole bunch of DHV stories or sexualize the conversation. With kino started very early and slowly ramping up over time, you can have a PG conversation with a strong sexual undercurrent. Every minute kino is delayed, it becomes twice as difficult. If the girl is REALLY into you, she will initiate kino with you if you don’t within the first 2 or 3 minutes of a first date. Most girls won’t do this though, as you are expected to make the first move.
Note I’m not saying kiss her in public. I actually prefer not to until bringing her to my place, or at least isolating her for the notch. Credit to Tuthmosis’s first date bang recipe for that particular tip, and it would probably interest you to know that I did not kiss any of my Filipina notches until I got them to my place.
The itty-gritty particulars of kino I’ll try to break down in order as a storyline: 1) First kiss her on the cheek, and then 2) guide her to where you’ll sit by putting your hand on the small of her back. 3) Tell her to sit a little closer to you, and lightly touch her forearm, or 4) accidentally brush the back of your hand on the anterior of her thigh. Talk some, gesture some, and 5) end each gesture with a hand on her upper arm, forearm, thigh anterior, or shoulder, whichever comes naturally. Rinse, repeat. 6) Ask her to write on pen and pad, and put hand on her back as she leans in to write. If she doesn’t recoil, then start stroking up and down her back, or put your hand on her thigh. 7) When she says something funny, one arm hug her and say “you funny girl, you!” 8) Keep your arm around her and stroke your hand on her opposite shoulder and upper arm. 9) Start holding her hand, and if she holds it back, you have a pretty good chance. 10) When it’s time, the drinks are finished, tapas plates are cleaned up, pay the bill, and take her hand and go somewhere else. Either venue change or your place. 11) At your place, stand close to her, stroke a strand of hair off her forehead and behind her ear while looking in her eyes, and then 12) kiss her. From there, take clothes off and go for the notch, deal with LMR accordingly.
V. EXPERIMENT
Sometimes we read great posts on game forums, but we don’t really absorb the information fully. To help you absorb what I wrote, what I’d propose is that you undertake an experiment. Of course you don’t have to if you don’t want to. But if you want to try this, you can do the following:
* Buy ear plugs.
* Go about a regular day with ear plugs in to see what it’s like being deaf or hard of hearing.
* Pay attention to how you ADAPT.
* Go on a date with a girl as a “deaf” guy, wearing ear plugs. (Tell her what you’re up to - you’re doing an experiment on what it’s like being deaf.)
Disclaimer: Please do this at your own risk, and watch out for cars! If anything happens to you while doing this experiment, I will not be held liable.
Think about the following, and please report back:
* How do you adapt or modify your behavior / game?
* Did you use less or more verbal game? More or less kino?
* Did you notice a heightened sensitivity and awareness to nonverbal communication and body language cues? If so, how? Observe what she is communicating to you without words.
* Do you think that if you maintained heightened sensitivity to nonverbal cues AFTER the experiment, with normal hearing, that it can help your game? Why or why not?
Please note this isn’t about seeing how hard it is being deaf, I’m not interested in that. I’m interested to see how you, personally, adapt to everyday situations without adequate auditory input. If you get good/better results during or after this experiment, please report back in this thread as it could be something we can all learn from, myself included.
I know this was long! Thanks for bearing with me. I hope we together can all learn something from this. I know I have a lot to learn, myself.