Monday, December 30, 2013

Advertising stuff and contact

I've decided at long last to make sure this blog is 100% free from advertising. I believe I have successfully cleaned all genuinely commercial links and ad blocks from the site, but . . . if you find one, please report it. Truth be told, I don't think the content here really should be commercialized, but thanks for trying push that on me, Google.

I also plan to add a way to privately communicate with me here. I'm seeing some search queries that are indicating that people wish to talk back but may not be wild about publicly posting comments. It will probably just be email, since I can't think of anything else that really does the job of keeping all the communication off the web. I'm open to suggestions if anyone knows the newer social media services well enough to point out a usable system beside email.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

The art of the soft neg

The neg is a cornerstone concept among the PUA types. It's the idea that you have to tear a girl's ego down a little bit in order to get her attention. As always, the Urban Dictionary does justice with its explanation: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=neg

Here's the thing, though: lots of guys who've been rubbed the wrong way by women over a lifetime take the neg as a license to firebomb a chick into surrender. The neg -- which ought to be a gateway drug into the sort of witty intellectual wordplay that gets high-quality women properly hot in their drawers -- tends to turn into a fucktarded fuckfest rather quickly. It's like handing a child a rifle and then immediately pointing out that there's a selector on it for more than just single shot action. It simply doesn't take very long before the child says "fuck precision" and just starts blasting everything in sight.

The neg is a good thing. Witty play is a core component of human sexuality. It's how high-quality women separate the dregs from the real gents. The art of saying something slyly condescending without being offensive is one of the highest demonstrations of value that a man can display.

And it's so simple . . .but in the way that sushi is simple. Sushi -- real sushi -- isn't raw fish. Any moron can sell raw fish and lots of morons do. And the true connoisseur knows it tests for it diligently.


The art of the soft neg in detail


Step One: Find a personal truth. How does she present herself? Is she cutsey? Is she goth? Does she believe she's a successful career woman? What sales pitch does she present that she herself is trying to buy into and is praying that you buy into?

Step Two: Contradict that truth . . . lightly. The neg is not about hurling bombs at people. The trick is to lightly nibble at the edges of her personal truth.

An example: if she presents as tough, then you contradict her toughness. That doesn't mean you knock on her ass and call her "cupcake". It means you lightly hint that you see past that personal truth, and that that's OK. You can tell her she seems too nice to really pull off the whatever tough girl look she's presenting.

Step Three: Meaningfully consider her response. Lots of PUA types will drone on the idea that the chick's response doesn't mean much. They're wrong in this particular case. How she reacts to that first soft neg of a core personal truth is a huge indicator of whether you should stick around for the rest of the show. If the wannabe tough girl doubles down on the tough girl routine instead of either playfully batting the remark aside or complimenting you on noticing the truth, then you need to consider finding the exit because the train to Crazy Bitch Junction may be leaving with you onboard.

Step Four: Refrain from further negging for a bit. When guys neg, they tend to pile on. This is a roundly bad idea. Social-sexual conversations are push-pull scenarios. Push-pull is, at its base, a form of torture. And like all forms of torture, it's most effective when the torturer becomes a safe place for the victim to flee. (In fact, that's pretty much the entire art of domming if you ever get into bondage.) Any good push-pull technique should be about 80% pull and 20% push, with adjustments as necessary for misbehavior and consistency when true misbehavior occurs.


The takeaways


A proper neg says something simple: I see you for who you really are.

Most women are far better attuned to understanding social signals than most men. And both genders tend to see the other gender through the filter of themselves. That means that women tend to overthink the social savvy that lurks behind any comment a guy makes. Women worry deeply about hidden meanings that would make men nauseous.

When a man dials his behavior in right, he signals at once that he understands the woman's emotional world and that he's not bothered by it. There's a thin line between "I see you" and "OMFG let's braid each other's hair!" The neg, when done right, services the need to demonstrate as masculine (little boys pick on girls) while still signalling some social savvy.

Every woman has a core mythical unicorn-monster that she sees as her idealized male. She wants him to be good looking and sexually appealing to all women, but she wants him to be loyal to her. She wants him to tough and strong and ready to kill the next motherfucker that comes down the street, but she wants him to preferably not beat her offspring to death if at all practicable. She wants him to have some sense of the feminine inner world without being pussified.

That's why the soft neg works well. It's a simple statement that yes, I am a man, yes; I can see you as a woman; yes, I appreciate what that means; and yes, I am in control without going off on a reckless bashing spree.

The human brain evolved as a challenge-response verifier for social and sexual combat. To shit test someone is the most human of activities. To neg someone is a step toward saying, "Yes, I see you laid bare and it doesn't bother me." Women, as the arbiters of social success, desire men that can present as masculine and still see past these things. They want you to be masculine, they want them to be feminine, and they want you to be able to live in that world without being a shaved ape with a chainsaw or a sniveling twat who can't quit crying.

Honestly? It's not that goddamned much to ask.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Why do women tolerate beta orbiters?

One of the more interesting questions that I think PUA and evo-psych types never bother to address is the question of why, if women supposedly hate beta males so badly, do they tolerate them?

First, it's worth noting here that "hate" is too strong of a word. The fact that a woman does not want to fuck a guy should not be construed as hating him. The world simply isn't that binary, so please grow the fuck up a bit, willya?

Second, just because she won't fuck you and you seem a lot like some pussyish guy she hangs out with who she also will not fuck, that does not necessarily entail that she sees that guy the same way as she sees you. The only thing you and that guy have in common is that you're both wimps who she won't fuck. That's not the same thing as hating him.

Anyhoo . . . why tolerate beta males?


Other people make great social props


Man is a social animal who also happens to be a fairly sexual animal. We're not social to the point of being ants. And we're not sexual to the point of being bonobos (thank gawd, because I'd have to quit the game entirely then). Socialization and sex are not one-for-one commodities, not by a long shot. In fact, they're not exchangeable at all. You can't just build up enough socialization points and then cash them in for sex. Doesn't work.

In fact, you don't absolutely need socialization in order to have sex. And you don't need sex in order to socialize (big win for people at Comicon). Being considered a sexual winner can help you socialize. And being considered a social winner can help you get laid.

At the end of the equation, social points can only buy you a ticket to the sexual dance . . . you still have to make all of the moves to jump from socializing to sexualizing. In fact, this is one of the few things that the PUA blogs get very right: escalation. At some point, if you're trying to make that jump, you have to make it clear to your partner that socialization is over and that sexualization has begun. This is where the thinly defined boundaries of consent start coming into resolution.

Here's the thing: you need more social props than you do sexual props.

Anyone who has ever known someone who completely subverted their social existence in order to be with one sexual partner will tell you this. Socialization, once it has been engaged and obtained, requires more effort than does sex, once it has been engaged and obtained. Once you've obtained a satisfactory pairing for both partners, it's actually pretty easy to throw away all of the props in your life and just submerge yourself in that person -- and in fact this is one of the reasons that love can be such a massively destructive force in people's lives.

Socialization works the opposite way. Once it has been obtained, it requires the continued acquisition of additional props. This means buying drinks, buying clothes, buying a car, having friends, Facebook, etc, etc, etc.

Beta males make excellent props. They're not a threat. They work hard for your attention. They can be sold off as boyfriends or as orbiters to other females as a reward for their friendship. They can be held in reserve as potential long-term mates. Their presence will ward off the weakest males and allow the female in question to select her suitors better for aggressive traits.

On balance, they're pretty fucking useful when you get right down to it. They're like a fully matured life insurance policy. You can hang on to it, cash it out, sell it, trade it, leverage it. Whatever.

If beta males could be securitized, every value investor on the planet would stockpile them. And that's exactly what women do.


They'll do as a sexual prop in a pinch


Let's say there's a hot guy you like. You're making your best effort to get him to notice you, but it's just not clicking. For whatever reason, he just isn't coming over to talk to you. What's a girl to do?

Start giving that big bad beta of hers a few sexual hints and some hope!

Women who feel entitled to the best men get angry when the best men ignore them. Women who believe they're prime assets also believe in their own scarcity. This is to a great extent the great sales pitch of the hot chick: "Sex with me is rare and valuable."

Of course, just because something is rare does not mean it is valuable. Planet-swallowing blackholes are rare in our solar system -- it doesn't mean you want one to suddenly appear!

For something to be valuable, there has to be a market. Or at least the appearance of market. (Go ask the diamond industry -- because carbon ain't that valuable without regard to form. In fact, according to the anthropogenic theory of global warming, we have too much carbon.)

Beta male orbiters are great for creating the appearance of a market. Even better, because they've been conditioned to worry that they're misreading the chick in question, they won't get too upset when she tells him, "Oh, I'm sorry . . . I think you misunderstood."

The idea here is force the aloof alpha male into playing his hand. It's the old school "Going once . . .  goooing twice . . .  gooooooooooooing three times . . . " sales pitch. Of course, she never actually has to scream "Sold!" So she can lash the hell out of this sales pitch if she wants.


Orbiters have value within the female social circle


One thing that guys never quite get about female social-sexual behavior is that very little of it is aimed at us. A lot of it aimed at themselves. Some of it is aimed at their family. A little is aimed at society writ large. And a ton of it is aimed their friends and their competitors (who are often seen as the same group of people).

A lot of beta male orbiters fosters the sense that a chick is in-demand. This attracts other female friends who're hoping to ride the wave of the hot chick's popularity.

Loaning out these men is a critical part of how women reward their social circle members. It also allows a queen bee to buy herself distance between her and her friends. Likewise, it allows her to buy off potential competitors who might be within two points of her preferred mate.

If a chick is an 8, there's a good chance a number of her friends are in the 4 to 7 range. This means if she has a beta male 5 in the stable of orbiters, then she has an inventory that she doesn't want that she can sell at a pretty fuckin premium to her social circle. Every hot chick has a less attractive sister or cousin or high school best friend or faux friend from Facebook.

One of the highest status roles in a female social circle is that of matchmaker. A socially competent queen bee can solidify her position quickly by becoming the go-to female in the group for mate-pairing. And the easiest way to do this is to have a solid batch of beta males available to sell off to her friends. One of the strongest claims to power within a female social circle is to be able to utter "I set those two up".


Orbiters create jealousy within and beyond the social circle


Sometimes you just have to put a bitch down hard. It's a simple fact of the Mean Girl world.

Let's say you have a friend who's a 5 and she's dating a male 6. You're an 8. Guess what? Any time you want, you can wreck that bitch's relationship. You don't even have to fuck the guy. You just set him up to think he has a shot, and then drop his ass hard. Everyone sees it.

It ends up acting as a form of harem control within female social circles. You ever want to hear a song that's about some real shit? Dolly Parton's "Jolene". What's the song amount to? "I know you can fuck my man, but please take pity on me because it would destroy my world." Guys don't write songs like that, but women do.

Beta males also create some insulation between her and interlopers. They ward off weaker males. They shit test stronger males. They're going to hit on and drive off unwanted stronger females who attempt to enter the social circle. Beta males are a wonderful form of defense-in-depth.


Downside: even beta dick is a threat to group cohesion


There are downsides of course. If a woman is forced to put a beta male out of his misery, it usually makes her look bad to the other women, who tend to view the action as mean-spirited, misleading, cruel, etc, etc, etc. The other females also aren't fond of perfectly good sperm being thrown away if they think the guy might have hit on them.

The obligation to sell off male social circle members to other women also creates a ton of trouble in its own right.

Not every guy a girl keeps hanging on is doomed. Some are in fact alpha males held in waiting. She prefers to keep these guys unpaired, but in most cases she will be forced to pair them off. Her goal will always be to pair him off to the weakest friend she possibly can, that way she can then peal him off of the friend when she decides to give him a shot.

This has the benefit of providing a storage space for lesser alphas. It lends credibility to the idea that you're not hording the good men for yourself. It makes your friends look good, which in turn makes you look good.

It also makes you look like the Third Antichrist if you don't go about taking him from the your friend the right way. Make no mistake about it: hot chicks view their friend's boyfriends as a reserve supply of potential mates. this is why smart guys know to game a girls friends harder than they game her.


Unwanted sexual access to male family members


A woman's friends are going to press her for access to the highest value males she can supply. Remember: we're primates, and primates don't wait for the better primates to give them the better goods. Surrendering a reserve alpha male is an acceptable price to pay for lifelong friend, but there are other costs that are less acceptable.

Female friend orbiters will push for access to the queen's male family members. This means attractive brothers, cousins, and even the father. And they generally consider the permission requirements to be non-existent.  A quick exclamation of "He's your brother, stop being so fucking gross / possessive / ignorant / jealous /  mean / incestuos!" creates a major challenge to the queen bee.

A queen bee has the same investment in her relative's sexual success as any human being. She doesn't want her brothers aiming low any more than her dad wants her aiming low. Also, family dynamics create whole new obligations that can quickly destroy the social group. Now you have to answer to your family for abusing your weaker friends.

Also, if a lesser female can assert herself into your gene pool, it implies she might be your equal. That creates a major threat to the entire supply of available sperm if a friend who has been beaten down decides to come our of her shell and really elevate her game.

Put bluntly, there's a reason that women keep their friends away from their brothers if at all possible. Nothing makes a woman more queasy than when her friends start hinting at the sexual availability of her male family members.

If you're a teenage girl reading this, first off, congratulations for getting this far. Second, I have an experiment for you to run. The next time you talk to your friend, tell her that you think one of the guys in her family has a kinda deep, sexy voice. Just do it. The response will blow your fucking mind. Your friends really, really don't want you sexualizing their male relatives.


Conclusions


Beta males are wonderful holding assets. Women know this and they apply this knowledge every day. they trade their beta orbiters to weaker friends like Pokemon cards.

Also, what you see as a beta orbiter she might see as a lesser alpha worth keeping in the circle for that distant day when she decides to have kids. Girls loooooove that "I was just being immature and now I understand" rhetoric. A decade of unsuccessfully letting 8s spread her can always be ended by finally letting a 6 or a 7 out of orbit and in for a plowing. Look how many women nod approvingly to "He was my best friend and I should have married him sooner" rhetoric.

Let's be honest. If beta male game didn't work well enough to pass on genetic code, it would cease to exist within a couple generations. Women didn't just suddenly decide one day to start treating wimps like dirt. Sad sacks have been hanging around in orbit hoping for a chance for years. It's a feature, not a bug.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Why you need to go for the highest quality woman

This is one of those posts I've had floating in my head a while. Let's just be honest about life for a sec . . . One of the the biggest things that holds people back in love and relationships is the fear that they're either settling or getting into something about their grade. "What if I find someone else?" and "What if I can't sustain this?" are the two biggest fears people have when evaluating the long-term worth of a new relationships and deciding whether to advances with it.

In the manosphere part of the internet, there's a bit of a low hum idea that if you're going long-term that you should seek a woman that's a bit below you're 10-point scale number. The basic notion is that her fear and uncertainty will keep her honest.

I disagree with this idea. Why? Personal experience.

The most difficult situations I've ever had were with women who were worried that I was too good for them. I don't handle the emotional maintenance needs of others well anyhow, so for me it just feels like this constant pounding. If before a first date a chick is already giving me the "I can't wait" treatment, I tend to get concerned. Because those women tend to need constant maintenance.

Now, I have the advantage that hot chicks tend to like me. As I've said before, if there's a hot chick in a bar who is really on to land the toughest guy available, she tends to go straight for me. No real surprise there, because if you're decent looking, have your shit together, and can stay emotionally distant, women will eat that shit up.

The only time that women that score a 6 or lower bother me is if they're drunk. Really, really, drunk. Or if they're with a group of friends and one of them decides she's going to show the others how the fuck it's done. I'm popular with the "Bullshit! I fucking dare you!" demographic about a half hour after drink specials end. I also draw the occasional shot at 1:30am from the girl who decides "Fuck it, he hasn't danced with anyone all night -- I'm asking him!"

By comparison, a sober 8 who is on her cycle will gravitate to me the minute she walks into the bar. Usually just straight-up girl approach with increasingly tighter orbits until she hits her limit for complete self-embarrassment. Sometimes she'll go for the soft verbal approach with a single light touch. And then there is the every now and then bump-that-wasn't-a-bump approach.

For my part, anyhow, it's easier to maintain a partner who is more attractive through simple aloofness than it is to try to maintain a less attractive partner complex emotional maintenance. I can only handle so many non-subtle requests for validation before I'm done. If you really don't think you can roll with me, then you shouldn't have gone out for the date in the first place.

What's funny for me is that I couldn't pick up a chubby 5 from Plenty of Fish of OK Cupid to save my fucking life. In fact, OLD was an unmitigated disaster for me. I can go out to any busy bar on any given weekend and pretty much grab the hottest single chick there without speaking and play it off like it's nothing and have it work.

I'll concede that a decent chunk of what attracts women to me is my comportment. I tend to game solo and sit by myself or just lean against the wall, talking to the occasional friend who filters past, but not really engaging at length in socialization. And women make their orbits past and try to get my attention. If you've read the blog much, you know I enjoy this a lot. I'm not really happy until they stat embarrassing themselves for my benefit.

I encourage any guy who's truly interest in learning some game to focus on developing an effortless aloofness to whatever level they can credibly maintain without risking incongruity with how they will seem once they open their mouths. Once you find your level for that, figure out what are the hottest chicks available that are drawn to it, and from there proceed toward whatever goal you have (sex, marriage, love, whatever consensual kink you're into). Don't go lower. Someone has to own the relationship, and the easiest relationship to own is a hot enough guy keeping a really hot girl trapped in a co-dependent relationship.

More fun with search queries

Since many people are willing to ask Google a question but not me . . .

"Are aloof men overly sexual?"

First, most modern psychologists classify avoidant personality problems as being a subset of sex addiction. If you're looking for the answer that science offers, then the answer is basically "yes".

Second . . . my own personal and completely unscientific experience as aloof /avoidant / autistic / whatever the fuck flavor it is today on the menu . . . "no".

The hard part in my viewpoint is defining what "overly sexual" even means. There's an old Woody Allen joke about a couple in therapy. The wife is like, "OMG, he's a sex maniac! He wants to screw like three times a week!" The husband is like, "We barely ever have sex. Maybe three times a week!"

You get the point, I'd guess.

It's worth noting that I tend to employ a two-track coping mechanism that allows me to track sexual needs to one set of partners and emotional needs to another set of partners. This is generally not considered the model of how avoidant personalities handle things. The typical avoidant person engages in a single committed sexual relationship and then basically starves their partner of attention.

I have my suspicions that the diagnosis is heavily over-used by couples counselors who have no trade in telling 40 year old women the real reason their husbands don't want to fuck them anymore (age, weight, weight, weight, boredom, weight, change in social status, age, weight,  and a little more age). If you're really worried about your relationship, you might want to give that idea a serious hearing before you dismiss it an move on to "he's being aloof". I say that for the benefit of being thorough, knowing full well that every woman dodges these questions in favor of preserving her ego. Whatever. I said it. It's up to you whether you bother to really think it.

I never really understood how to explain to other people how I feel about sex. First off, I largely do not enjoy sex. I've always felt that it was terribly over-rated. Yes, I get that lacking the emotional component in a sexual relationship is expected to deprive me of some of the value, but even in a rather narrow, beastly, and sociopathic construct, I just don't see the wonder in sex. For me it's like taking a piss that's been held in. It's relaxing and a relieving. But, I've never really gotten the high that other claim.

Mind you that I don't get the high that other people claim from a lot of things. Something really, really, really has to set the excitement meter off for me to even register it. In truth, the only really great high I ever get is from beating the system. Anytime I cheat and get away with it (or especially exploit the system in a non-cheating, not-ethical manner) that's when I really enjoy life.

That actually tends to make sex a bit depressing for me. To be blunt, when I'm really driven to get a woman, it's easy. And the one thing you have to understand with me is that easy is pointless and depressing to me. For example, work and making money is depressing as fuck. Mind you that I am good at it. But it's hard for me once I'm above the baseline that I need to survive and "enjoy life" (I use quotes because I don't truly enjoy anything for very long) it's hard for me to care.

In other words, women are like work to me. I do enough to deal with the issue effectively, but on balance I don't understand love addicts or sex addicts any more than I understand workaholics. So, for my part, it's difficult to conceive of myself as "overly sexual".

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Even more thoughts on avoidance! (Yay!)

I mentioned in the previous post that I don't view myself as a typical avoidant personality. Like any personality issue, it comes with a lot of examples of how you're expected to treat your partner. Except, I don't do much of it.

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.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Further thoughts on my avoidant personality

One thing I try to emphasize any time I discuss psychology is the importance of recognizing the value that the concept of spectrum has. Everyone falls somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Everyone falls somewhere on the sociopathic spectrum. Everyone falls somewhere on every spectrum.

Why? Look at the sociopathic spectrum. To a greater extent than people like to admit, sociopathy is about being effective. Nature has selected humans to be effective. Sociopathy is simply the product of a person, in some cases, being effective to a fault. To be blunt, there are times when its the more socially beneficial choice to be less effective for the simple reason that being too effective crushes feelings and disrupts group dynamics.

Same thing goes for the narcissistic spectrum. You do have to like yourself. And sometimes there is value in have an unrealistically high liking for oneself. After all, the world is full of jerks who are going to try to tear you down, and it's not in your best interests to listen to them.

Avoidant personalities are no different. Everyone is avoidant to some extent. Considering the role that avoidance plays in sexual addiction issues, it's important that we avoid others to some extent. After all, the entire world would become a eugenic nightmare overnight if we simply indiscriminately ran around fucking everyone available. It's just not good for the species.

I'm not a fan of the term "disorder" for the simple reason that I believe that any trait that has passed the test of evolution deserves to be given a fair shake. You'll rarely see me attach the word disorder at the end of any clinical description, for the simple reason that I don't consider it disorderly for a person to be sociopathic, autistic, narcissistic, or avoidant. Even if you think about highly neurotic personalities, how disorderly is it, really, for a person to obsess about hygiene or the food they put their bodies? It's actually quite rational.

Yes, people do get to the point where they need to adjust their behaviors in order to function better. But I don't believe that the thin sliver of knowledge that is modern pharmacology and psychology used in combination should be considered a superior judge of human fitness than hundreds of millions of years of evolution. People deserve the chance to be flawed and eccentric and broken. Where else is our art going to come from?


My avoidance


Let's talk about me. More to the point, let's talk about my avoidant behavior.

Off the bat, I'd like to point out that I'm not a textbook avoidant personality case. Which is to say I was never molested. Physchologist tends to creeps, and they like creepy stories and creepy explanations. And their favorite creepy explanation for avoidant personalities is childhood sexual abuse.

That's not to negate the legitimate cases of avoidant personality issues that are tied to abuse. It's meant as an indictment of the propensity that psychologists have to fixate on that one idea against all other sources of developmental trauma.

Sometimes a person becomes avoidant because they just had a crappy childhood. A crappy parent will do the job just as well as an abusive one. Negligence, poverty, and non-home violence are all good enough to do the job. Trust me. I say this from personal experience.

One of the major indictments of modern psychology, IMHO, is that it fixates on disorders of the wealthy. Modern psychology is an industry rather than a field of research, and consequently it goes where the money is. Avoidant rich kids don't get that way by growing up ghetto-fied. Which means most of the literature on avoidant personality focuses on how people with enough money to pay $150/hr for therapy sessions get that way. And, to be honest, there's pretty much only one way a rich kid gets to be avoidant.

My avoidance . . .

My avoidance is born out of poverty. If you really want to boil it down, that's what you get. I grew up poor in a poor family with a widowed mother who didn't really want the job of raising kids. I joke that my mother would have made a killer 1950s sitcom dad. She preferred going to work as opposed to raising her kids. And she let us know as much to boot.

I won't belabor the poor thing in detail. You can read that here and here and here.

I never really do much detail on my family life. But here's the big factor there. When I was in my teens, I got saddled with basically raising a niece and nephew that my sister left with us. Remember that my mom wasn't big on the kid racket.

One of the big factors that triggers avoidant behavior in people is the belief that love creates problems. When you feel like too many people depend upon you and that you're the only person in a family really trying to make things work, you end up with a deep distrust of the idea that starting a family of your own is a good idea.

I have a lot of sources of avoidant behavior in my childhood. My sister did a lot of bad shit while fucking around and doing drugs (such as, say, leaving her kids with my mom). My dad died when I was five, and my mom acted like it was the most wonderful that ever happened to her (thanks mom). My mom never made a serious attempt to get back into a relationship after that (she very avoidantly torpedoed her one decent shot). The only actual relationships I saw any have growing up were my older bother and sister. His involved fist fights. One of her baby dads actually tried to burn him and her alive in their trailer.

You get the idea. Nothing good to learn from there.

My mom also had what I can only call a sore-loser version of feminism (yes, I am aware that some consider feminism in its entirety to be a form of sore loser whining, and I'm disinclined to tell those people to stop). For my mom, apparently everything that was ever wrong in her life was the fault of her deceased husband and the various men who refused to appreciate how awesome she was.

At this point its worth pointing out that narcissism runs deep in my family. My sister is a malignant narcissist if there ever was one. My maternal grandmother was a narcissist who had a psychic break after her husband died of cancer. A lot of my mom's shitty parenting was the product of being raised by a narcissist who went into a complete downward spiral when confronted with her own mortality. And, of course, my mom has her own brand of narcissism that tries to masquerade as a form of victimhood and a bit of a martyr complex. And much of this manifested in her own self-serving brand of feminism that basically let her off the hook for the many times where she tried to get ahead and deliberately stopped short because (like all narcissists) her ego won't allow her to take the big chances that are required to get ahead in life.

Unsurprisingly, I have my own run of narcissism. It's learn, not genetic. But that doesn't make it any easier to unjigger.

Another fun thing that children develop from a tough and negligent environment is a bit of a sociopathic streak. I actually quite appreciate the slight sociopathic streak that I have. Frankly it comes in handy when you're trying to talk your way out of speeding tickets or that time you threatened to kill your neighbor (no, I am not joking about either of these). It also comes in quite handy the first time someone decides to stick a gun in your face, but you want to tell them to go fuck themselves (again, not joking).

But the big thing I have is the autistic streak. Left to my own devices, I prefer the autistic inner world. I love to figure out how things work. There's also a big autistic streak in my family. A lot of tinkerers. Little kids disassembling and reassembling their Christmas toys just to see what makes them tick.

I read an entire encyclopedia set by age 8 (we got one as part of an educational program that poor families were eligible for). I bricked my first computer within two weeks of owning it. I also unbricked it.

My brother was much the same way, but with cars. Oh and breaking into places. That part didn't work out too well for him.

The big takeaway from all of this is . . . ? Don't be the stable person in an unstable family. It's a shit deal.


From there to here



One thing you have to appreciate is that who I am today is not who I was then. The form I was in my early teens would easily (nowadays) be considered a mild form of Asperger's syndrome with some serious aggravations caused by a bad environment. It was a loud household, and I generally holes myself up in my bedroom in the furthest corner of whatever house (or trailer) we were living in at the time.

My teenage years sucked. You have to understand that we were dirt poor. My view of myself was that I was fat, poor, dirty, nerdy. I existed. That's it.

Funny thing was, puberty in my case disagreed with this self-view. I still don't understand what happened, and it barely registered at all back then. Girls tended to like me. Nice girls from better families, in fact.

I had a couple things going for me. One was that people didn't fuck with my brother. Two was that people assumed I was larger and crazier version of my brother. The big difference, in truth, between my brother and I is in how we view violence.  My brother is the type of person who lets shit needle and needle at him until he blows up. I view violence as instrumental (sociopathy for the win, baby!).

The prevailing view on me was that I was:

  • Smart - My former teachers still talk about me. "Smartest kid" is a common usage.
  • Tough - I once was maced and just kept on going and my brother was stabbed and kept going. In a small town, tough brother pairings develop reputations fast. Ironically, my brother and I didn't grow to like each until well into adulthood!
  • Violent - And willing to go lower and dirtier than everyone else in a fight. No one ever threatened me without either bringing a weapon or trying to ambush me.
  • Rebellious - My former teachers still talk about me. This time not so positively.

In retrospect, I realize that I could have been rolling in pussy in my teens. I didn't know what to do with it. Again, I was enjoying my autistic inner world and trying to avoid the mess around me as much as possible. Somehow, this translated into the idea with girls that I was aloof and unobtainable. It also led to jealous guys claiming I must be gay.

Yeah, needless to say, that was a lot for a kid to digest. Too much violence. Too much negligence at home. Sexual signals from girls that I just wasn't picking up on at all. Being called queer behind my back. Fun. Fun. Fun. High school. Only worse.


The power of fear


One thing I always hated about my life is that other people want to understand me, but no one really has it in them to say anything to me.

People don't fuck with me. Understand that when I say this, I mean that state police troopers don't fuck with me. I do pretty much whatever the fuck I want and people get out of my way.

However I learned to project fear out into the world, it works. People regularly think I'm a body guard. Or if I'm by myself at a club that I either am a bouncer or (if I'm dressed well) the owner. An older friend of mine once said that I always look like I'm casing a place to rob it. Even the mouthiest drunk spoiling for a fight will not actually escalate with me. That's how people perceive me. I am a quiet threat that is best left to pass.



How women that like me see me


I've said before on here that I am a TV trope. I do sit at the sweat spot in the female libido. I'm a smart guy. Tall -- 6'2", so I'm the right kind of tall and not freakish tall. I have money and I do tend to wear it when I go out at night, but not in overbearing way. I have a tough and intimidating streak.

I have regularly been described as attractive. Sometimes in terms that border on hyperbole. Some terms: "movie star", "kinda cute", "white guy that got swag". I've been asked whether my online dating profile photo was really me. Yes, my inner narcissist enjoys that way too much. I don't really see it. (Especially movie star, although in defense of the tag, Steve Buscemi is kind of a movie star, right?) I try to see it, but if you really asked me to lay it out there and explain it, I couldn't. In truth, I know that I am attractive enough that I get eyed by women I don't know in the middle of the business day.

More importantly, every woman that has ever decided to swoon my way is absolutely convinced there's more going on underneath it all. I am the difficult, distant, attractive guy who just needs the right girl to crack him open. Women love that shit. Don't want a boy to be too easy to crack open.

Understand that in the arc from awkward, poor teen to whatever the hell I am today, I figured a lot of this out. I went from not really understanding that the girl in front of me in Spanish class was interested in more than discussing my taste in music to being able to scope out an entire bar and within seconds figure out who the easiest lay was going to be.


Why I like the avoidant label


The range of my behavior goes from high function autism to high function sociopathy.  I'm comfortable with that fact. In truth, every human being has the right to be effective at doing what they want to do. And when I'm willing to let the layers of impairing neurosis slip away, I am a highly efficient person at getting what I want.

The big unifying threat throughout my experience, the thing that really ties it all together nicely, is the avoidant personality. No matter what my situation is, my goal is to avoid situations that require me to be both emotionally and sexually vulnerable. That's what makes me tick.

Yes, I can sociopathically seek casual sex. Yes, I can autistically retreat into my own little inner world. Yes, I narcissistically enjoy stringing women out (and OMG do I love the compliments). But those are three very divergent approaches that you just don't see very often in a single person. What ties it all together nicely is the avoidance.

Monday, December 9, 2013

A two track approach to being avoidant: an introduction

One thing I don't really hit on much -- but that's worth talking about more -- is that I am a perverse and deformed take on the traditional avoidant personality disorder. The big difference between me and the typical avoidant personality is that I tend to utilize a two track approach in order to fulfill my needs for intimacy.

The average avoidant person tends to involve themselves in a single, co-dependent long-term relationship with a person who is a love addict. Basically they anchor one needy, dependent person in a relationship and then proceed to traumatize the shit out of that person by denying their needs. Worse the victim is typically characterized as a love addict, a person acting on a parental abandonment complex  by desperately seeking someone to truly love them. They're often trying to work through childhood trauma by essentially redeeming their missing parent through a proxy relationship. The basic though is "Daddy wasn't available (physically / emotionally / both), but I know he was a good guy and I'll prove that by loving the shit out of this really distant and detached guy."

I don't do that. I tend to follow two tracks that each involved fairly large sets of different people.


Track one: casual sex


I don't get a lot of mileage out of sex. In truth, I consider it by far one of the most overrated aspects of the human experience. That said, it's there and it has to be dealt with.

I solve the problem by seeking the most casual sex possible with the most available chick who I find attractive on a given night. To summarize this issue fully, I could not give you a full name (or in many cases any name) for the large majority of my sexual partner. A mediocre fuck in the back of the car at 2 am with a chick I met at the bar is pretty much peak sexual intimacy for me.


Track two: endless emotional entrapment


I'm never really happy until I have at least two, preferably three women stuck in what might best be called a "friends without benefits" relationship. I have a gift for friendzoning the shit of a chick. Not even a good friend zone relationship. A really shitty friendship where she basically spends all of her time begging for any scrap of attention at all.


Never the twain shall meet


The one big feature of my two track approach is that a chick can opt for one or the other. She can choose to be sexually available for the rare night where I even care to be involved sexually with someone, or she can opt for the endless pining of the incredibly mediocre friend zone that I provide.

If you go for the fuck, you better understand that the relationship is the equivalent of a cruise missile -- fast, on target, and about to be blasted to pieces and forget forever.

If you go for the friend zone and the illusion of a longer term relationship, you can forget ever getting a piece of ass.

The women that opt for the emotional track are the bulk of what I discuss on this blog. In truth, that's because that shit is the triple-stacked cake with the frosting on it for me. That type of endless emotional horror show is absolutely my kind of kink. I can very rightly say that it's exactly what gets me off. Nothing makes me happier than the idea that several women at any given time will completely subvert their entire lives to notion that they just need to dial the knobs the right way in order to get me into a rleationship.



Building an appropriate defense once you know she likes you


The one truly great thing about being an avoidant male is that no woman who is honestly in your league will ever attempt to ask you out. She will do lots and lots and lots of stoopid shit to get your attention and engage you, but girls always want the guy to ask them out. They will concoct the dumbest fucking scenarios for acting like "oh gee, here's a great chance for you to ask me out" without every just saying "Hey? You wanna . . . ya know . . .  maybe do something together some time?"

It's a complete violation of the female ego construct. It's not allowed.

For the avoidant guy who is two-tracking women, this is wonderfully easy to exploit. The girl will catch herself in what amounts to a game of Tetris -- always trying to play one more round, always trying to do a little better, and doomed to never win and end the game no matter how well she plays it.

Worse, because she's likely a clinically certifiable love addict, she doesn't comprehend the idea that the avoidant guy doesn't want an engaged, long-term relationship. She thinks the game is winnable. She thinks the next round will get her closer to the victory screen and that the credits will roll. She doesn't understand that the endless lack of winning is a feature and not a bug. She thinks she just has to work around the bug and figure him out and then everything will be OK. After all, everybody wants to be in love, because love is the most wonderful thing in the world, right? And failing that, he eventually has to get horny and want a piece of ass, right, because all guys are pigs, right?


Defensive layer one: race


I've mentioned race before, and I'm going to mention it again. I'm a white guy who lives in a white society, and who manages to have a disproportionate number of relationships of both types that I've described with women outside my race. I circulate in a segment of society where I could comfortably never have to worry about a black or hispanic woman every hitting on me. In other words, I put myself in this position often enough that it's unrealistic to act like it's not a feature.

Here are a few of my race-related stories . . . Hispanic waitress pt1, hispanic waitress pt2, black stripper slash fuck buddy, the half-black, half-Asian orbiter from my college days. (FTR, Asians don't make the list because Asian girls just don't do it for me at all.)

Race makes a great barrier in an avoidant relationship, especially if you're the white man and she's the black or hispanic girl. Women from darker-skinned minority groups come with fear and inferiority pre-installed.  That's where sassy fat black female attitude comes from -- it's a front put up against a seriously ignorant, mean, cruel and stupid world that treats black women like complete shit.


Defensive layer two: age


A lot of my aloof-avoidant relationships are with women who are significantly younger than me. I'm in my mid-30s and I frequently initiate these relationships with women in their early 20s.

When I was younger, I actually did the complete reverse with sexual relationships, going for much older women (in a couple cases, women who could have easily gone to jail). In fact, the only at-once emotional and sexual relationship I ever had was with an older women when I was in my early 20s and she was married to an invalid.

Sometimes I regret not putting stories on here because then I end up needing to link them and they're not here. The age thing is especially one of those stories, because the best example is by far  an unpublished one. Dammit . . . right now I have a great example that falls under the "will never publish" set of stories that involves a 20 y.o. virgin. Arrrgh. It really illustrates the point better . . . but . . . no. Can't publish. Ever. Too wrong. Too evil. Too hard to even explain to myself.

Underpinning point of that story if I did tell it is that the age difference provides an easy way to friend zone the girl credibly. After all, what kind of gentleman would I be to take advantage of some poor young ingenue? Funny thing how a 20 y.o. virgin who's saving herself for marriage will act when she meets an older guy that she thinks is The One. Suddenly her friend Jesus can just take all those promises and go fuck himself. Every girl will seek dick first and then figure out how to get right with Jesus later if she thinks you're The One.

And of course being the rare older guy who, when offered young, virgin pussy, tells her "gee, no . . . can't" makes you look you must absolutely be The One, because you're clean and decent and too virtuous to violate her. Well holy shit wow! He must really be The Right Guy. In short, it's a great way to look like a hero (narcissism? check.) and still refuse intimacy (avoidant? check.).


Defensive layer three: impossible barriers


Remember the one who got through? This is Mrs. Married to the Vegetable.

What made that relationship so open and emotionally fulfilling? Well, because her dying husband fucking refused to just have the decency to fucking die!

How great is that? I could be emotionally open because she could never bring herself to let anyone know that she was fucking around on her dead husband. With the exception of me and her dying husband, I'm pretty sure no one else ever knew about the relationship.

Of course I could be open in that relationship! It was the perfect relationship, because she was never going to rat me the fuck out for being available emotionally and sexually!

And the minute he dies, and the impossible barrier goes away, and suddenly the relationship becomes possible, guess where the fuck I went? Away.


Defensive layer four: physical distance


I don't really publish these stories because they're boring as fuck. I'm not good at long-distance because I need to see my victim up close. I've only ever done two of these, and both were photography clients who could be tortured properly by way of the business relationship. A half-example of one that didn't pan out.

I do, however, loves me some overseas vacation sex. Example. I actually have better stories, and dammit I still need to publish the threesome story some day. Grrr. The shit I'll never get around to writing is often the shit that best illustrates my points. Wonder what that really says about me?

Suffice it to say, if a chick is gonna be stuck thousands of miles away and never able to track me down, I'm gonna take advantage of that.


Defensive layer five: drugs and addiction

For those who didn't bother to follow the previous half-example link in "layer four", it should also be noted that not only did that one have distance, but it also had amphetamines involved.

Drugs make a wonderful way for an avoidant personality to justify their behavior. After all, I'm not being avoidant for a bad reason, right? I'm trying to avoid all the bad shit that's going on in her life.

By far the most sexually satisfied I've ever been with a woman was with a semi-regular fuck buddy who was a heroin addict. Complete mess of a human being, but heroin addicts have a wonderfully sympathetic quality. And she had this wonderful, reckless sexual energy all the time (high or not). Just a splendid wreck of human being, and she adored me in that beautiful way that only the true love addict can adored the true avoidant personality.

Another case of a truly perfect relationship for me. She was never even close to quitting or even thinking about quitting. She always wanted to fuck. She always wanted to curl up in my arms and cry. And I could tell her to fuck off at a moments notice whenever she became too much for me because the drugs were a constant source of problems.

I've come back to this well multiple times. It's probably not a good thing that I generally feel my most sexually open and safe with IV drug users who I can push away in the blink of an eye.


Conclusions

 

One thing I find fascinating about my own behavior is how important it is that I don't have to be sexually and emotionally available to a women. Or that when I do try it, that she's in such a thoroughly compromised position that I can easily discard her when she becomes inconvenient.

I want to expand upon this a bit, but it's getting overly long for a single blog post. I think the next thing I'll do is break some of these relationships down into their pieces in order to shed some light on them. For now, fuck it, sleep calls out to me.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

Why I abandoned online dating completely

A while back (almost a year ago) I decided to explore online dating more seriously than I had in the past. Let's just say that it ranged from disappointing to spectacular failure. Too much crazy and too much unstable, especially for a guy like me who has a very low threshold for girl-related bullshit.

For a while after those experiences, I dialed it back and dabbled. Here and there I'd pick up a date . . . and still get the same damned results.

To be blunt, too many people think online dating should be a made-to-order mate designing system. The people you encounter have no interest in improving themselves. They're broken people who don't care that they're broken and generally take offense if you nudge them in a positive direction.

Online dating is a roundly shit idea. Collecting all of the failed people with high expectations in one spot and having them piss each other off is not a good idea. The entire concept is flawed for the simple reason that men explore online dating in the hope of having more sex and women explore in the hope of being able to highly selectively winnow down their mate choices without having to deal with guys they don't really want to fuck.

It just doesn't work, except when you get two people who are completely spent and choose to issue their surrender to reality on the same day. I have yet to see an attractive long-term couple that met from online dating. So unless you are screening for people under the assumption that you are both losers and today is the day you both decided to lose together and call it a win, online dating is not going to work for you. (To answer the obvious question, I am not ready to accept that I am a loser.)


Random observations

1. If you're an attractive guy, online dating is harder than real life. I've been told that I'm an attractive enough guy that I assume this is a fact. I don't see it myself, but enough requests for a song make it a hit even if it's sung by a shitty band, right?

It's kind of weird the first time a chick questions whether your profile photo is real. I know I haven't really done the right thing with my dating life, but is it really just considered beyond the pale that a guy in his mid-30s who looks decent and kinda has his shit together hasn't settled down? In truth, the whole "that ain't really you" thing becomes depressing because it makes you wonder just how fucking low you've set your sights that the chick feels that it's appropriate to ask the question.

2. Good luck finding a stable woman. The brutal reality of online dating is that it selects for the worst of the group. The one thing that OLD has taught me is that the scene takes an unfairly bad wrap from the sore losers of the world. I've met lots of nice girls at the bar; I never met one worth a pint of piss through OLD. Seriously, OLD brought me a chick who's working on becoming a psychologist and whose every move suggests an endless need to engage in power games -- OLD is just full of healthy role models!

3. If you're gonna make a move, just make a move and forget the long-term consequences. Girls on OLD are so fatally flawed that the only worthwhile move is to simply drive to get a piece of ass and forget the rest. They're too flaky for long-term dating, so forget about it. Get in, get laid, get on with your life.

4. I learned a lot about myself. For example, I learned that I will never marry a psychologist. Fuck that. I learned that the vast majority of women attracted to my OLD profile were psychologists (seriously, I hate to feel like the victim of a externalized machine of control, but WTF PoF and OKC!?!?).

I learned that since losing weight that I've been aiming way too low, and worse that the women I was hitting on were questioning why I'd be hitting on them in the first place.

I learned that I'm happier with the bar scene than any other available option for pursuing a mate.

I learned that letting things happen naturally in real life is better than trying to make them happen artificially over the web.

I learned that I am in fact looking for a long-term mate -- regardless of the reasons that I've failed to meaningfully pursue it. I've learned that my inability to cope with a long-term relationship should be seen as separate from my desire to have one. That is to say, just because I torpedo myself in that department doesn't mean I don't want a LTR.

I learned that you have to a limit where you just say no way and skip the bullshit. Which is where I'm now at.