"Maybe Game made me Weird?" — Johnny's Story

A frequent commenter on my blog, Johnny, recently wrote down his experience with pickup in a number of blog posts. He goes into detail about his background and motivation, describes various encounters with "professional" PUAs, the post bootcamp high, and his eventual disillusionment. Some nay-sayers (aka. shills) will now say that Johnny should have kept approaching, and pony up more cash for some more bootcamps, but as it turned out, he figured out how to picking up girls like normal people do it.

It is not a virgin-to-heaven of pussy story, but a blatantly honest description of a guy who found great success in school and at work, but lacked social skills. (No, "pickup" does not provide you with them.) He ends up in New York, finds the community, and thinks this is the key to success. In a series of posts he details the time he spent trying to learn pick up.


The starting position surely sounds familiar to many of you:

Even experiences from going out should have confirmed that whole thing was shit. I never really used any lines, no eliciting of her values, no NLP, no cocky funny, no behaving alpha, no caveman - none of that. In spite of that, there were plenty of occasions when girls liked me, when I seemingly did nothing - sometimes even did stupid shit. I remember one time after talking to a girl for long, I was drinking beer and suddenly had the urge to cough. Result was that I ended up spraying beer on the bar table from my mouth (I should emphasize that this is usually not me. I am generally a very calm and composed guy :) ). We still made out that night. However because I did not do ANYTHING, and still the girl liked me, I guess that was part of the problem. I wanted to control this thing. I wanted to feel that all this PUA stuff was helping and not that this whole thing is just totally random.

Thus, I ended up discounting all the random occasions when I did not do anything and the girl liked me, and instead focused on the ones where I did do something but nothing happened! I thus felt, I need to get better game!

I don't want to spoil the surprise, but anyone who has attended a bootcamp or listened to a pickup "guru" will nod approvingly. Eventually, though, there is a turning point:

After the bootcamp, I went out and probably did 70-80 street approaches. I got probably more than 25 numbers. All flakes. Every single one of them. Asked them about it. They said - keep doing the same and one day it will all be easier! This was the final nail in the coffin.

I find it remarkable that Johnny was confident enough to see that this "industry" is a joke. On the other hand, there are far too many guys out there who keep approaching despite a complete lack of success. On one of the worst places in this regard, Zan Perrion's Ars Amatoria forum, where people indulge in some absurd medieval fantasies about pursuing women but never having sex with them. There you can find people being proud of having done 1,000 approaches (one date, zero success) and telling to the world that they enjoyed showing appreciation for the wonderful women they have interacted with.

Johnny eventually awakens, and I am proud to say that I have played a role as well:

Overall, I did not get laid even once from all this time in PUA. This was around August of 2011.

This time period detoxing is what changed it for me. I focused purely on doing things that I like. I went about exploring NY on my own. Focused on my dance lessons. Took random lessons here and there. Went out to try new bars and restaurants. Invited friends over from nearby cities. My mood starting lifting up. During this time I also met some awesome cool guys. My dance instructor used to like me a lot - she took me over the weekends to nearby cities where she taught workshops to travel with her and her friends. Everywhere I went, because this time I was just focused on enjoying and not on what I was doing, I actually started noticing for the first time all the girls who liked me. 

There was also severe cognitive dissonance that my mind faced during this time. It did not make sense that so many awesome guys and girls love hanging out with me, invite me to go out with them and I kept bombing so badly at cold approach. Maybe it was "game" that was making me weird?

During this time, one night I went out to a bar with friends, there were this cute girl who was looking at me and smiling, I went up to her, chatted with her about random stuff, she was an intern in the city for the summer and and it all went so smoothly. We exchanged numbers, her friend kept telling us that we should go out together. We hooked up about a week later.This was my first hookup in NY.

It gets even better afterwards.

Overall, I can only encourage you to read Johnny's blog and tell others who are skeptical about PUA about it as well.