A common example is using money to control your partner. I don't, unless you count a complete unwillingness to buy a woman anything as a form of controlling her. In truth, I don't like to go near Rich Guy Game, so for me I avoid this tactic for the obvious reason that it just doesn't jive with my self-view, my view of women, my view of my, or really even my view of life, the universe, and everything.
Blame. This one is a split answer. Internal, I do look down upon the women that are involved with me. I don't ever say it to them. In fact, I just largely try to avoid saying much of anything to them.
Withholding emotional interaction. That one's a big yes. I do.
Withholding praise. I guess this would have to be called a yes, but it should be qualified by the idea that I don't go out of my way to allow any relationship to get to the point where a woman could reasonably expect praise.
Withholding sex. In the cases of those women who've been placed on the emotional / non-sexual track with me, it's a big yes. A disturbing yes, actually.
Control by silence or anger. I'm going with no. The thing with me is that if a chick want to engage, I'm cool with it.
Ongoing criticism. Nope.
Staying unnecessarily busy. Not quite. One of the beauties of how I configure my avoidant behavior is that a women never gets to a point where she can ever feel that it's appropriate to make this particular demand.
Searching for the perfect girl. I don't believe so. They tend to tie this to porn and strip clubs, which I don't like. Honestly, this tends toward a weird for of porn shaming that seems to be anchored in some weird feminist conspiracy to maintain the sexual value of women by claiming that porn is bad. I'm just not buying this one at all.
The presence of a partner. They don't list this as a criteria because it's apparently presumed. The real reason it's presumed is because there isn't much money in badgering single guys who can get laid.
My thoughts
I tend to think that there's a weird genius operating underneath a lot of my avoidant behavior. What's clever about it is how easily it lets me off the hook.
I've spent a lot of my existence hiding in cracks in the system. My sexual behavior is no different. There's a big crack in the system left by women because they can't bring themselves to ask a guy out. This allows a guy like me to selectively determine which women suit separate needs best and maintain on-going non-sexual / emotional affairs with one group while firing off meaningless acts of casual sex with another group.
I should point out that I actually friendzone girls who work at the bars where I pick up chicks for casual sex. A decent number of the women I jerk around emotionally actually get to watch me do my thing (at least in the first couple phases) sexually. They get the stories and everything from their friends who work there too.
I can remember this one shot girl who I actually used for sex and then turned around and friendzoned without further explanation. She's never had the courage to ask me what happened and I've never cared to do more with it.
The hispanic waitress is one of these girls. (For those keeping score, yes, the regret that you're sensing by my repeated mentions of her means exactly what you think it means.) You could see the change in her composure the second she saw me. And for all the orbiting and trying to get through, she never once complained about me running around pushing up on chicks in the club where she worked. She saw no contradiction in the behavior, even though it was all being done right in front of her.
I tend to downplay how well I knew her. Let's talk about it . . .
The perfect co-dependent relationship
That's exactly what M should have been. She was the textbook love addict seeking an avoidant partner. She had abandonment issues because her dad had done serious time (FTR, she regularly visits her dad now that he's out and they do get along).
If you recall my list of barriers, she had four going for her! Race: she was hispanic and raised around lots of black folks. Drugs and alcohol: mostly weed and booze, but she was a stumbling mess of a drunk when she decided to tie one on. Distance: her non-college home was over five hours away. Age: when we first she was 20 and I was 33.
One thing I should just state here and now is that this is one I do regret missing out on. When you talk in therapy terms of "what did you lose" or "what did you miss" because of your behavior, M is something that I missed. She is actually a really nice girl. Cute and ever so slightly pudgy in my kind of way. She would have loved me to the ends of the earth if I had been decent enough to just to give her a little more to work with. I mean that you could literally see the spring in her step when I was around. She really, really though the world of me in a dangerously over-the-top sense.
The one really perverse thing about being an avoidant person is that you don't like seeing what most guys would kill to have. A positively bubbling woman sets off negative signals all over the place for the avoidant man. Worse for M, she angled into the emotional turf all on her own. She was clearly trying to game from comfort building and socialization (generally not a bad angle, it should be noted). This made it very easy to slipstream her into the emotional / non-sexual relationship category.
The real horror is that she had to be remotely aware of what I was doing with other women who came to that bar. FTR, we mostly saw each other at the bar (usually the one she worked at though there were other). This is a big part of how I contain these relationships. If you can containerize a girl and keep her from being sure that she's even really a friend, it tends to leave her too emotionally stood off to ever be brave enough to step up and say, "Hey, this friends thing isn't working for me." If she doesn't really know whether she's an actual friend or just a drunk friend, it makes it harder for her to then attempt to escape the friendzone. #seriousprotipsforsociopaths
People tend to open up to me much more gushingly and much sooner than they should. Women that like me tend to barf out all of their concerns quickly. The beauty of this is that at once it creates a sense of closeness at the confession and a sense of shame at telling someone who may not be your friend your entire life story. It's a big part of my MO. And of course, I don't share back. If at all possible, I try to limit information to the point that she can't ever track me down. Even getting a name out of me can be challenging.
In the emotional / sexless relationships that I pursue, I do a very good job of feeding into the worst aspects of co-dependency. She feels like she's made major confessions and that I truly know her. She also feels weak and ashamed for doing so, but I'll prompt even more out of her if at all possible. I'm very good at that. ;-) I'll let her lean in on the arm and feel a semblance of intimacy, but I make sure to never pay it back. No arm over the shoulder, hand on the head, whatnot (I actually reserve those for the casual sex partners, because it creates a brotherly feeling that breaks them down faster).
This is always what killed me with M. Now, she actually worked in a part of that club where she didn't really get to watch me do my thing. (Decent modern clubs have different sections for loud dancing and quieter interaction. They're pretty much designed to be PUA playgrounds now.) But I know for a fact her friends had to see me on the other side of the club. And I know for a fact she had to see me on the nights that she came in.
That's something I've never understood about women. How can women ever watch a guy they pine for go off and do awful sexual things with other women while they just sit there clinging to "well, at least he really knows me"? Are you fuckin kidding me? Why would you ever allow that to happen to you?
Of course, that is the genius of my approach to women. I contain them. I cheat some emotion here and some sex there, and somehow they're perfectly happy to let me do it.
They say that exploitative people and avoidant people are very good at selecting their partners. I have to assume that's where this starts. I have to be good at selecting the women that will go for this sort of drawn-out, low hum form of abuse and self-denial. Therapists claim that a lot of the attraction of the avoidant partner is that they allow the love addicted co-dependent to just float in their own filth unchallenged. In many ways, I think a lot of how I relate with women is highly engineered to maximize that.
The one thing you have to understand with me is that I'm an emotional vampire. Sex is an afterthought. It's like putting gas in my car. It has to be done. But it doesn't mean anything to me. You'll never hear me rant about that one time that it felt amazing to put $30 in my car's tank. The emotional dependency, on the other hand, is the good shit for me. I love having that chick sitting there like a caught fish with the hook stuck in the side of her face, just flopping and dying out of water. Keep her alive, but nothing more. I eat that shit up. I love it in the most disgusting and perverse way possible.
And horror of horrors, I miss her.
No comments:
Post a Comment