I received a couple of rather bizarre emails and blog comments recently, in which people (probably shills) were praising the work of some "guru" who, instead of focussing on how to pull girls, was nowadays all about telling guys how to handle their "emotions". This was supposed to be the key to successful long-term relationships and marriages and of course it would pay off plenty in your professional life as well. I felt reminded of virgin gurus who promoted surefire ways of getting laid, and now that this well has run dry, the new business model is apparently "lifestyle coaching" or "life hacking". One might wonder how a guy in his mid- to late 20s who doesn't look like a ladies' man at all is going to say anything particularly insightful about long-term relationships, though.
But let's not pick on those snake oil salesmen and instead discuss how you can get a handle on your emotions. Surprisingly enough this doesn't work through reading books or thinking about hypothetical situations. Instead, it's a matter of practice. Get nervous just talking to some girl? Talk to more girls! Get clingly after you've gotten a girlfriend? Well, why might this be the case, buddy? Could it, just maybe, be a consequence of you not having had much success with girls in your life, and now you think she's the one and only, even though she's a dim-witted brat of at best average looks and a highly defective personality?
This is a serious issue, bro! There are countless examples of guys with little to no sexual experience falling for literally the first girl that was willing to take them. In the best case they ended up in an abusive relationship with skewed power dynamics, paternity fraud, and an eventual divorce. Who could have known guessed?
The core problem is "neediness". The most insecure and inexperienced men obsess over women that hardly pay any attention to them. This is enough for those losers to pump money into that girl, hoping that somehow some kind of sexual relationship will evolve from those shaky foundations. Those guys tell you that they are "dating" some girl, by some definition of dating that does not include any kind of sexual contact.
Guys who are that inexperienced are easily exploited by girls. All it takes is one girl who is willing to kiss them occasionally and fuck them once everty three months. Again, this is not some kind of hypothetical scenario. I've spoken to guys who told me that their girlfriend whom they were dating for months has only had sex with them two or three times. Their girls seemed to care very little for them, and were normally quite noticeably pining for some other guys' cock. Yet, those guys claimed to be "in love". What happens in those situations is that the girl just does not want to be single, since many girls consider it almost as some kind of stigma. If she's single, she must be undesirable, she thinks. Thus, any kind of guy is better than none.
Then there is the issue that some girls, particularly as they get older, view relationships as some kind of business transaction. They are eager to trade their fading looks for a permanent meal ticket. For this purpose sexually inexperienced guys are suddenly very appealing. Indeed, an experience many "nerds" make, as they grow older, is that suddenly women they have been ignored by for years suddenly express their interest, maybe in the form of a message on Facebook where she writes, "Hey, why don't we have coffee to catch up?". Things can go quickly if she's nearing 30 and hasn't yet found a guy who was willing to keep her.
What's that guy supposed to do now? He has virtually no sexual experience, and here's this 30 year old woman who has been pumped and dumped for 15 years straight. He won't have a chance to defend himself against her manipulations. If he lacks a back-bone, and she is just a bit cunning, she'll easily be able to pull his strings. Of course, things like that never happen in real life. Right, guys? Maybe it would help him if he read what some reformed pickup guru has to say about "emotions"?
To avoid ever getting into such a horrible mess you have to get a handle on your emotions the only way possible: through experience. I'm not saying that you have to dump five girls in a row before you can attempt having a serious relationship. Some guys are emotionally more distant by predisposition anyway. However, there are plenty of guys who lack an emotional backbone --- excuse the overextended metaphor. Those people should treat lightly in the dating arena. There are women out there who will insist on marriage after knowing the guy for barely a month. Google is an amazing resource. Here's an excerpt from one of the first stories I dug up:
People are often astonished when I tell them we only dated for three weeks before my husband proposed, and only knew each other for four weeks when we got married. They asked how I knew and I can't explain it to them. I knew he was the one for me, even though I was 25 and he was only 19.What a fucking coincidence, Jennifer! Dude, if your sexual and romantic experience is close to zero, and you suddenly meet a woman who is hell-bent on making you her boyfriend, and babbles about children and marriage after one or two weeks, you should not think that finally you're about to get your dick wet, but instead you should run for the hills.
You won't be able to sort out your emotional state through introspection. That's just like trying to get buff by reading about lifting weights. Instead, you have to expose yourself to situations where you have to face your emotions. How do you know you might to have to work on that? Easy, if you're together with the first girl you ever met, you certainly have a lot of growing up to do. Or if you find yourself fantasizing about a girl that was merely polite towards you (this is a common PUA trap). Or, if you immediately want any girl you have had any kind of sexual contact with to become your girlfriend. Get some experience! There are a lot of dangerous women out there, so beware.
You can't really control your emotions anyways. Certainly not by reading about it, but also not through experience. Life merely reveals your character, it doesn't develop it. Character is unalterable. We all know people who have enormous amounts of experience yet make the same mistakes again and again and seem stuck in patterns they cannot escape.
ReplyDeleteOf course exposing yourself to experience is still the best way to see precisely what sort of character you do, in fact, possess. Perhaps your character is one in which you don't make the same mistake twice. But if not, no amount of experience will make it so.
So the solution is to simply go and live and do what you have no choice doing anyways. Choice is an illusion.
That's a rather fatalistic view. People do change. For a relevant example, just think of all those "reformed sluts" who partied through college and all of a sudden are hell-bent on tying down a guy in order to have a permanent meal ticket. I do agree that some people tend to make the same kind of mistake over and over.
DeleteWhat I mean is, faced with the same inputs, people tend to produce the same outputs. The "reformed slut" suddenly finds herself faced with a new set of inputs (reduced sexual appeal, age), so we would expect her outputs to now be different as well. But lets say after realizing she wasted her youth on the wrong guys and had a chance to magically go back and do it all over again, do you think she would do things differently? I'd wager she might initially try, but would quickly revert to the old patterns. She wouldn't be able to help herself.
DeleteSo people change their behavior when their reality and incentives change, but they never change their character, in my view. Yeah, its fatalistic. Schopenhauer thought the same by the way :)
Oh, it turns out that we (mostly) agree after all! I don't tend to view the world fatalistically. However, I do think that given similar situations people will, in most cases, react very similarly. There are exceptions, like when they are in a very unstable emotional state and could react in different ways, which is due to their almost complete lack of self-control in those situations. Those are extreme cases, though. In general, I think that people have certain dispositions, which they tend to follow more or less. Oh, an amusing remark regarding "reformed sluts" is that they initially really, really want to do it differently this time, but since all they know about getting a guy into a relationship is that it depends on them spreading their legs, they tend to fall back into their old behaviors very quickly. I once had a bizarre encounter where I was about to pull some 27 or 28 year old, and she said that she "doesn't do that". I looked at her and told her not to bullshit me. Worked like a charm. Schopenhauer would have liked that.
DeleteIn short: lazy bitch before college equals lazy bitch in college equals lazy bitch after college -> "The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior."
DeleteYou can change attidutes, but it is very, very hard to change values, because they tend to be part of the whole personality that doesn't changes due to fixed motivational systems on a deep level (brain structure). Because values are very difficulte to change it is nearly impossible to change someones personality (consistency-hypothesis and null-hypothesis).
To change one's personality, one must first change one's character. Character is the foundation for your personality, and personality creates a certain behavior. Your character can be changed through certain bodywork therapy, which transforms tension into energy that, rather than holding onto patterns which cause an undesirable behavior, create a kind of "free space-time," which allows for change to take place.
DeleteAction trumps emotion. Great article as always Aaron.
ReplyDeleteToo bad there's a real possibility you dump that first girlfriend and never meet anyone again.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting comment. I think I better reply to it in a separate blog post. It's not an uncommon point of view, but it is a rather questionable one.
DeleteDid you ever make that post Aaron? I'm a new reader but that guys comment was close to the bone, for me.
DeleteNo, not yet. I'm very busy these days.
DeleteI'll have a post on this up very soon.
DeleteSleazy, again I loved your unabashedly honest view on the world. It's so refreshing and insightful and always a good read as well…
ReplyDeleteI hope you are doing well! (… puh, I still need to write you that email of gratitude by the way…)
Your email was interesting to read. Thanks!
DeleteThanks for reading it. I just wanted to express a modicum of gratitude.
Delete… and just to recap: I'm so glad I didn't fall into that very neediness-trap when I was between 16 and 20 yrs old. There were two girls, for whom I was "crazy" about and who I thought I "loved sooo desperately". Of course I was just needy and comparatively inexperienced and hadn't had any kind of RL with a girl to begin with. So I fantasized about being together with those girls and oh-how wonderful it would be and how utterly I just desired them. But since I wasn't very masculine and just didn't project any core sexuality at that time, their pussies simply ignored me. In retrospect I can say now, that life and fate were doing me a huge favour at that time!
ReplyDeleteBecause had they jumped on the exploitable opportunity of getting me locked into a RL with them and then following up their female game plan of committed RLs, children, castrating the male etc. (which one of those girls did just a few years later with another poor guy, who had just a bit more status than me and also fit her religious background better… I'm just a sceptical philosophic atheist and not Christian or religious in any way…) then I'd be fucked, stuck and trapped within a hard-to-escape-from prison. Grande dame Esther Vilar writes a great deal about this exploitative dynamic in male/female-relations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99r46HbiJEw
So, yeah Sleazy, you're absolutely right. Especially in RLs each person should first sort out themselves, explore themselves and the varied aspects of their own psyche, the different personas that they could assume, get a feeling for who they'd rather like to be, identify flaws in their own thinking, get experience in the real world and especially see the world for what it really is like (and not running away from it by believing into any kind of denial of reality or wishful thinking).
It's just like what they tell you in airplanes before take-off: "First care for yourself and then you may help the passenger(s) sitting next to you."
I really like your very last sentence. In fact, I think that most people are not fit of having a healthy relationship. A lot of people desperately want to be in one to feel "complete". Then they expect their partner magically make their life better, and cure them of their shortcomings, or just dissipate their constant feeling of boredom and lack of purpose. I've known girls who went through boyfriends almost like clockwork. Within five or six months they got fed up, and were with another guy, never realizing that the problem wasn't with their guys but with themselves.
DeleteYes, what you describe is so true. And I think that – as far as our "Western/European civilization" is concerned – one reason for it lies in this fateful Platonic idea, that out there in this world must exist that one, unique counterpart, that person, that would fulfill all our longings and desires and that would finally, finally make us feel "complete". Then we'd be "happy" and the very purpose of our whole existence would be met. (What an egocentric bullshit-concept. In the Opening Chapters of "Minimal Game" you shed some light on this as well.)
DeleteCorrect me if I'm wrong here, but I don't know of any other Culture that so strongly propagates this very idea, and that has combined it with the notion of "romantic love" and especially the concept of "legitimate" marriage. On top off my head Indian Tantra comes to my mind. And yes: Tantric sexual philosophy (mainly the Buddhist branch), for instance, is very much about the strong bonds between men and women, but it's always about the interplay of "the female" with the male" or of the corresponding energies. It is not personalized – e.g. if a man were to develop himself mentally, he certainly could recognize the essential qualities of the female in more or less any woman and effectively sexually united with her. (Personally I don't think this rings entirely true in real life, but still it's an interesting idea and I know some men and women, who abide by this concept.)
Ancient Greek philosophy is not without its pitfalls and Mr. Plato certainly has never been one of my favourites. It is no wonder, that the simpleminded early Judaeo-Christians in remote Roman Palestine fell for the Neo-Platonic ideas floating around the Eastern Mediterranean at that time, and that they readily made those stupid, purely theoretical concepts part of their own religion.
Of course, this is not to say, that marriage itself or a fixed bonding between an man and a woman would per se be a miserable or stupid thing (as you certainly could vouch for). But the circumstances and the background of the persons involved do matter.
And any kind of concept, that negates the biological and mental facts of human existence is bound to be rendered null and void… and during the process of this happening certainly is gonna cause heaps of misfortune for both men and women.
"Yes, what you describe is so true. And I think that – as far as our "Western/European civilization" is concerned – one reason for it lies in this fateful Platonic idea, that out there in this world must exist that one, unique counterpart, that person, that would fulfill all our longings and desires and that would finally, finally make us feel "complete". Then we'd be "happy" and the very purpose of our whole existence would be met."
DeleteI think this phenomena is very common with naive and inexperienced (literally or they never thought about why their relationship(s) failed and never changed anything -- they just keep repeating their old patterns) girls. They have all this stupid phantasies about unicorns and other fairy-tails in their head and as a result they imagine that their relationship(s) must compare to that. In the beginning they are all-over you, but then, at some point, the reality hits them and they start noticing that their relationship isn't anything like they have imagined since childhood; and think this is nowadays a big socialisation problem -- our grandparents had entirely different expectations, because back than it was a way more violent environment and as a result their expactions of a good a relationship were way more realistic and down to earth and they took everything into perspective(!). What now happens can be called regression to the mean and is supposedly one of the reasons why Romeo and Juliet both died at the end of the story (One could do a thought-experiment and wonder what would had happend if they hadn't died -- leaving their families out of the picture for simpliticity). The result is simply that they break up. This phenomena relates very well with attachment theory (Ambivalent/Resistant).
"Or if you find yourself fantasizing about a girl that was merely polite towards you (this is a common PUA trap)."
ReplyDeleteI'd say that's more of a virgin/inexperience trap. But then again, I guess those things are one and the same. :D
Great article, Aaron. In this society there is so much pressure against men to express their emotions (and in my family, ugh...) so this kind of approach is refreshing to read. This is much better advice than to just "talk about how you feel."
ReplyDeleteI like your blog, but notice that recent topics are much more critical, caustic, cynical, or even bitter towards women. There have been posts about female entitlement, random erratic female behavior, aging, and obesity. This is like a list of Roosh complaints.
ReplyDeleteYour early posts focused on criticism of PUA's who failed to properly screen girls for interest. Is that because you had plenty of access to hot young women in German nightclubs with little effort? Is it because you are older and must now reject older, pickier women? Is it because your readers with bad experiences have sensitized you to womens' deficiencies? Somehow, there has been an interesting convergence between your sentiments and the philosophically different Roosh camp.
I wouldn't call it particularly bitter, cynical or even overly misogynistic. Instead, there's something to be won by seeing the world exactly as it is and not shying away from it. Simply looking into the sometimes not-so-beautiful face of reality.
DeleteOne can enjoy women and share their company in a positive way, have them enrich one's own life, but still be aware of all the pitfalls of the male/female dynamic. I think this enables one to appreciate the good things in life even more.
It's popular in some circles to call anyone who is skeptical or merely critical a 'hater' or 'bitter'.
DeleteAnonymous, I don't get why older women are supposed to be pickier. It's the exact opposite.
You are realistic, not bitter. But why have recent posts been more critical of women than early posts? I suspect you have gained experience with deluded aging women. The worst ones are formerly-hot middle-aged, who expect middle-aged guys to cater to them. These women grew accustomed to middle-aged guys chasing them. Sorry, but those guys are buying drinks for younger women. Middle-aged women can date much older men, or settle for divorced, broke, balding middle-aged guys. Sadly, these womens' learning curve is slower than their depreciation curve, so they become spinsters.
DeleteI don't really get your comment. You say that Sleazy's posts have been more critical towards women but then you write something like that? Not that it isn't the truth in some cases, but isn't this what you were disagreeing on?
DeleteI don't really get the roosh comment. Some people really need to wake up. If you spend some time on Mark Manson's forum, it's like anything that's even remotely negative about women is deemed impossible. (For men it's quite the opposite these days).
Ha, take a look at this! => http://www.commandattraction.com
ReplyDelete… isn't it so funny to watch those ludicrous sales pitches again and again and just wonder, what kind of utter stupidity another moron will come up with next… "seduction science" … "helped literally millions of men"… gosh, there's so much wrong with absolutely every aspect of this video, it's not even funny anymore (or it just gets really funny again!)
Maybe this little vid from that Croatian moron might put a smirk smile onto your face this Sunday morning… ;)
I just saw that video....
DeleteDjeezes, I mean at least Tony Robbins is a good speaker and a scammer. This guy is just a scammer.
I play up the provider role myself. "Girl I wanna keep you forever, and feed you, and bathe you, and help you tie your shoes when you can't look down or bend over." And I keep my bitches around, I love feeding them and fucking them. Then they get to tired of all the feedin' n beatin', and I let 'em go back out into the wilderness.
ReplyDelete- Nigel Big Game
… and you might find this one really interesting as well (it's in German though):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.das-maennermagazin.com/blog/die-ewige-liebe-zwischen-mann-und-frau-gibt-es-nicht
… a bit harshly put, but mostly true…
That idiot who wrote that article doesn't know shit about biology and worse, he doesn't even know how he get's a hard on. LOL! You don't need the central nervous system (aka brain + spinal cord) to get hard.... What a moron!
DeleteYou should look up the word 'satire' in a dictionary.
DeleteMost guys who are inexperienced are so naive to treasure their girlfriends a lot. Little do they know that many girls love to have that "last dirty night" before they jump into a relationship.
ReplyDeleteHah, just to tell you how things are!
Off-topic: http://www.quora.com/Physical-Appearances-of-People/What-does-it-feel-like-to-go-from-physically-unattractive-to-physically-attractive
ReplyDeleteOff-topic: http://gravityfalls.wikia.com/wiki/Double_Dipper -> PUA rediculed by Disney Channel :)
ReplyDelete