Check yourself

Some questions you may ask yourself when pondering the question why, oh why, aren’t you getting laid?

- Are you turning up at parties alone, with a gang of single dudes or with your crazy band of groovy brothers and sisters?
- Have you ever thrown a party that more than, say, twenty-five people attended? Did they dance, get drunk, and send you messages that it was the craziest party ever?
- Are you being invited to social events, and how often? By whom, close friends, relatives, strangers, your mom?
- Are you talking about ‘seduction’ more than you spend time jerking off?
- Do you even still undertake to talk about the act of seduction while going out? Kill it please – it’s not helping.
- Do you jerk off more than you talk to girls?
- Have you read more pages of material than you’ve talked to girls? I bet you have.
- Do you look and act like every other guy (even though in your head you though you were doing it different), or on the other hand, try so hard to stick out that it’s awkward?
- Do you delude yourself that that girl was checking you out? And more importantly, did you go up to her and ask her if she was?
- When was the last time you allowed yourself to talk to and like a girl without feeling you NEEDED to bone her or you’d be a total loser?
- When was the last time you had a relaxed, interesting conversation with anyone about something other than ‘social interactions’?

And so on – anymore of these? I love using these to check where I am.

xPR

Drop the backup plan

I used to be a proponent of the ‘Go fuck ten other girls’ principle. For me it basically implies – from a larger perspective than purely effacing your obsession with one girl by bedding as many other girls as possible – that you make sure you always have some kind of backup girl.

Let’s say you’re working on this one girl. You like her, she drives you crazy. It would suck if it didn’t work out, and that feeling is making you fearful and less effective and natural. What I used to do, is make sure I was also seeing another girl. Having another girl in the back of your mind does effectively alleviate a lot of the anxiety, and as such you can’t say much against the principle of having something in the back of your head that puts any undue anxiety you may be having about a particular situation in a more bearable perspective.

However; having a backup girl has the fundamental flaw that it is a shaky foundation. On the longer term, it means that your peace of mind in a certain situation depends on your relationship to your backup. Say you met a girl and with your backup in mind, you managed to stay calm and move forward. Then all of a sudden, your backup falls through. She doesn’t answer your texts, she has a new boyfriend, whatever. That’s right, your whole base falls through and you go right back to being outcome-dependent.

OK easy solution: get more than one backup! Yes again there is nothing to be said about the effectiveness of this strategy, and as I’ll tell you later it’s actually something that will be in your life even when you don’t actively pursue it as we are obviously doing in the situation where you ‘make sure’ you get some backup.

Here is the thing. Someday, somehow, your backup is going to fall flat on its arse. However well you structure it. It’s like those rainy Sunday nights where none of your friends picks up the phone. What I realised is that the strategy of having other girls as a backup for your peace of mind is flawed, as the ground it rests on is shaky.

So what other base could you have that is as effective, and that is rock solid? It’s yourself. The biggest point of growth for me lately is to finally get round to enjoying my own company, constantly. I used to do it occasionally and then let it slep again. But what gives you a really solid foundation is that even within a conversation you can turn back to that feeling of being all good, all by yourself. So you don’t need the conversation! It might be great, and very exciting, but you won’t feel lonely and dejected when nothing comes out of it. You still have yourself!

This process forced me to spend a lot of quality time for myself and shunning any form of neediness. It’s not easy, because these patterns are years old. And the replacement for that strategy, my natural way of being when I’m not trying to get anything may be readily available, it’s also rusty from ill-use. So I’ve had to get used to situations where I knew I could have done something better, but I didn’t want to use a strategy and I simply didn’t know how to handle it spontaneously. Without panicking or self-blame, I accepted the situations as they were and all of them turned out all right, even though they might not have been the fireworks they could possibly have been.

A very peaceful state to be in! And I am noticing with the strengthening of my natural way and complete independence of peace of mind, that people are becoming more attracted to me. Logical, I really love myself  As this happens, the true meaning of ‘being, not doing’ emerges again. Goals are directions, intentions that are there without you consciously having to strive for them. It’s in your aura: what you want is what you exude to the world, and the world gives you back. So for starters, take a look at what you’re getting right now: it could tell you something about what you are actually going for.

First blood

Just got home, I’m tired. Had a good time. I realise that what excites me most is great interactions. I could also feel that tonight, I wasn’t completely there. Still tired from yesterday, my energy was too low to enjoy being there. That’s either a lesson in sleeping out and taking time to rest, or a lesson in underlying things.

Met many people, and basically did what I felt I needed to do, letting go of all anxiety of the result of my actions. What happens, happens. It’s the first step towards living for myself. At a certain moment, I stopped interacting. Tired I guess, I leaned back and let it happen. This was nice, but it wasn’t superbly satisfying. In a way, I didn’t really care. Like I said, I’m probably tired.

Things are changing though. No more anxiety. Better connections with the people I meet, as I completely refrain from any pushing. Handed my number to three girls, without taking theirs. Honestly, I don’t think any will call me. But that’s just incongruence from me when I stop shining. I also don’t approach strangers that much anymore. I do, but less. I hang with the people I know more, and make sidetracks. Playing it cool, letting people come to me. I feel how the vibrant energy, the open smiling face and not looking for anything but my own amusement are very compelling. It’s working! Enjoying this ride…

New Year’s Resolutions

Letter to a friend:

Hey man,

I’m glad you find it useful! I wrote this also in reference to how I want to be dealing with the girl I went to Las Palmas with, with whom I have more or less the same situation. She just broke up with her boyfriend and is as such not open to new adventures for the meantime, and she’s still angry. But we spent much time together so we’re becoming closer. I want to avoid becoming the gay friend, so keep the tension up, and still stay close and have her chase me. Yesterday she sent me that she loved the holiday, and that she’ll probably miss me in days to come. I kept it simple and replied ‘me too xzb’, because now she’s telling me how much she likes me and I go ‘okay then’. Yes!

I did tell her during the holiday that she would make a nice girlfriend, and she became all flustered and said that she liked being with me, but she also kept me at a distance and said something in the likes of ‘we’ll see what happens later’, of which I concluded that I have her permission to hit on her, which is good – she sees me as a sexual man – but that I have no preference over other guys. From a historical perspective, that’s a step forward! I used to fall in love with her and then subtly be told that it wasn’t going to happen

So this is my challenge; to be the guy in her life without pushing it and also not pushing myself, because I haven’t even kissed her! Maybe it’s a turnoff and if I’ve invested too much in it, it’ll be a shitty situation. To let it happen and let the attraction make itself out of the quality of our interaction, not out of the smoothness of my way of playing her (because then I can’t respect her as she’s falling for a fake game).

So I want to get to know her, and be the one thinking ‘do I like this girl? Do I want her as my girlfriend? Or do I just want to fuck her?’ and also to be honest about this and have her play by my rules. It’s a lot harder than chasing because it involves taking the risk of losing her completely whereas sucking up to her will keep you close even though you may become the gay friend.

My theme for this year is not to ‘chase’ girls. I’ll get to know them of course, even actively. Like when I go out I’ll go over and talk to new people, but I won’t ask for numbers unless I have a good reason, like socially. I’ll hang out with them, and of course indicate my interest when the opportunity arises. But no more going out just to meet girls; no more walking up thinking that I just want to take her home; no more dating and hoping to get together. It’s taking distance of the frame that I need to go after girls to get them, and letting them come because I can just relax around them and show them what I’m all about without being scared of her rejecting me.

I think that’s one of the most attractive and most authentic ways of being as a man, and also hard because you make no compromise to be with her, and you have to trust in what happens and in yourself. It’s being that guy that girls say about: ‘He drives me crazy. I’ve been trying to get his attention all night and I just can’t get a grip on him. God, he’s so HOT!’ Instead of :’He’s been hitting on me all night. I kind of like him so I might take him home, even though I have the feeling that he’s just after the sex and not really interested in me.’ You know what I mean?

What wasn’t in the letter but what I realised yesterday night as I was lying in bed stoned and drunk after living it up with my flatmate’s boyfriend who needed a study break:

Separate the yearning from the actual pleasure of having it

Beautiful concept this is. Imagine you see a hot girl. You want her. You crave her. You want to lick her face and… well, you get the picture. You yearn for her. This is why you want to get to know her and make her become attracted to you. So far so good. What happens next is that ideally, you walk up to her and talk to her. You get to know her, and you gradually replace projections and intuitions about her with the reality of her being. This is where the actual pleasure comes in, and the schism between your yearning and what’s actually there.

What I’ve had so often is that I don’t really enjoy a girl’s company as much as I imagined, but that the illusions I had about her before are constantly superimposed on the reality of the situation. I identify myself with my yearning. Ergo, I am more affected by her than is warranted by the actual situation. She of course notes this and accordingly, feels like she’s being chased by me and that she’s such high quality. Like most guys make her feel, without reason.

I’ve noticed that beautiful girls get so much slack, it’s not even funny. Just because of their looks people treat them like they’re special, and they haven’t even done anything! It’s extremely powerful. It’s the opposite of being black in Texas; people look at you like you’re a turd that got up and started talking. When you’re a beautiful girl, people enjoy you using the word ‘like’ every three seconds and fawn over your stupid remarks like you just redefined the course of Western philosophy.

But you know all this. What I want to introduce is the concept of the division between your yearning and the actual pleasure of knowing her and being with her. Yearning is a good incentive to get to know her, but it should be replaced as soon as possible with your estimation of her character. This is where you can combine proactively meeting people and still not throwing yourself at them. You take the first step to get to know them, but from then on it’s a two-sided process where both parties continuously decide whether they want to engage further or not.

For me, it’s a gut feeling. Something that I know even when I’m horny as hell and I just want to fuck her. In the back of my mind, I still know what the truth of the situation is. Connecting to this makes my interaction more real, and more fulfilling. And makes me shitloads more attractive of course, because who else does that?

This last part shouldn’t be the goal however. Using this insight as a strategy is probably unavoidable, but in the end the objective is to BE this way, not ACT this way. It should be part of who you are, which has so many implications that it basically defines the way you live your life.