Incompatible Lives

“It’s time for you to be a father, not chase tail all over the country.”

The voice cracked on my cell phone.

Angrily pacing in the airport, waiting on my return flight, with the phone clutched tightly in my hand, I countered, “It’s about me at this point in my life, my focusing on myself is not wrong. You can’t pour from an empty cup.”

My daughter had been crying in the background when my mother spoke next.

“You’re a shitty father. Your kids need you and you’re flying around chasing pussy.”

I had never heard my mother speak this way to me, and it shocked me greatly.

“Has everyone lost their damn minds up there? Do I get time to myself to travel, date, and sleep with women? What business is it of yours what the hell I do when I don’t have my kids?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that your kids need you and you’re not here”, she said.

I had this happen before. It was clear as day to me.

Back in my marriage, my miserable dead end marriage, my ex used to call me at work with kids crying and guilt me into trying to come home, saying “they miss you”.

She would leverage my job against my family and she knew she was doing it. And here was my mother, another women in my life, trying to guilt and shame me into coming home because my daughter was a mess.

My daughter had been suffering from anxiety, a curse that I passed down to her, and she wasn’t coping very well. And as her screams and cries harangued in the background of my phone call that day, I wasn’t having another woman in my life try to tell me what I needed to do, leveraging my lifestyle with my kids.

I wasn’t hurting anyone. I was just going out on my time that I didn’t have my kids, traveling and meeting new people, and yes, I was having sex with women. So? “What the fuck?” was going through my head big time as I tried and failed several times to calm down. So there I was, in an airport in Pensacola, yelling at the phone.

Before this altercation, I had spent the better part of 2 years traveling all over the United States, by car and by plane, visiting places I’d never been, meeting people from Twitter and other walks of life, and yes, sleeping with women.

I had spent the majority of my 20’s working, not dating, and being terrible with women. My 30’s were spent with marriage and kids. And after I jettisoned my marriage after 10 years at 40 years old, it was time, albeit late, for me to sow my oats. I hadn’t had this kind of power with women in my life and I wanted to try it out for a spin. I was doing it within the rules of my divorce.

There were weekends I didn’t have my kids, so what harm was it for me to go and enjoy my life?

“I really thought I had thought this through” was running through my head.

Conundrum

Why wasn’t I able to pull this off? I thought I had done my homework. Why in the hell was I dealing with this?

I wanted to continue to travel. I wanted to continue to date all over the country. I wanted to continue having fun with my free time.

But what I didn’t understand? With my particular circumstances, with who I was, and with what I was doing, I couldn’t pull it off.

Some men can and do.

My kids were suffering from my absence, even if I didn’t believe it.

Yes, when I was there, I was there for my kids. But, I wasn’t really there. Between work, hotels, flights, rental cars, date nights, and all the other stuff that was piling up, I was missing from my kids lives. My mind wasn’t where it needed to be. With pussy, dinner plans, and travel getting the lion’s share of my attention, I was mailing it in with my kids.

They needed a strong, grounded father who had built a foundation of strength and stability. They were getting neither from me. And when the inevitable blowups occurred, they (and the women in their lives) needed a strong, masculine calm to break the tension, something that I could not provide at that moment.

And I knew it. Damn I was having fun doing this life. But in a round about way, even if my mom was wrong for calling me a shitty father, she was right about one thing. This wasn’t me, and I wasn’t there.

I couldn’t pull it off. Some other dude could. I couldn’t.

So, as I left the airport bound for home that day, I had to rethink my entire strategy and if it was even possible to have these incompatible lives.

My mother had said very hurtful things to me. Things that I knew weren’t true, but things she had never said to me before. I had to grasp why she felt this way.

The women in my life (mother, sister, and ex) were losing control of the situation because I never had it under control. I took off week after week for a new destination, all while leaving these women in charge of a situation that I figured they had control over. But the minute I left, the shit hit. Why?

Because I wasn’t there. Not necessarily there physically. But there. My presence. My infrastructure. My frame. My setup. My processes.

I had done none of it to help offset any issues that I was hoping wouldn’t come up. I knew about my daughter and her volatility. I still did nothing. I blindly let myself get away with it, and now the check had come due.

She wasn’t getting her dad. She was getting a dude mailing it in on the days he was around and passing it off to others on the days he wasn’t.

The one thing I had wanted in life was to be good with women, and here I was, better than I’d ever been, and I was being asked to give it up for my kids?

Yes. Yes I was.

My kids needed me.

Putting It To Bed

Did I have to give it up?

The thought and question raced through my mind as I flew back home.

The flights lasted longer than any other I’ve ever taken, because I was being asked to let go of something I like doing, but it was becoming detrimental to my home life.

I understood, finally, that I could travel and do some of the things I wanted to do, but just not to the scale of how I was doing them.

I had to get back home and plant firm ground to give my kids the foundation and frame they needed to thrive, even when I wasn’t around. So I did just that and established myself firmly.

And as if by magic, my kids improved dramatically.

As Zac Small says, “Presence is greater than presents.”

And it was proven after my flight landed that night.

A year later, I went back to my mom.

I went up to her, gave her a hug, and told her I forgave her for calling me a shitty father.

She apologized for calling me that as well.

She understood that I had improved as a father, by simply being there for my kids, as opposed to being there for unnamed women.

No amount of pussy is worth jeopardizing your family over.

The women in my life that were the most important to me were getting the full me, finally.

Daughters, mother, sister were getting me, but also, the real me. I wouldn’t put up with any shit, but I would respectfully acknowledge that I was lacking in certain areas as a father, and that was more important to me to correct than any other issue at that time.

And my job was to make sure that my kids got me first and often. I needed to be there for them, even if it meant sacrificing my short term goals, I had to focus on the long term of my kids.

My lives, for just me, were at the moment and for the foreseeable future, incompatible. I couldn’t be the single dad who picked up girls any more. I had to just be the dad. And be a good one, which I knew I was.

But I also had to come to the realization that a long term relationship is what I wanted.

I just had to come home.

Attractive Versus Hot

Photo Credit: Barnorama

She was gorgeous.

I saw her when I first walked into the room at the networking event. I went over to the bar and talked with the bartender for a moment, then ordered my usual Zombie Dust ale. I had been to many of these before, but this was the first time I’d seen this woman at this kind of event. She wore a light blue business suit, lace cami underneath, and a pearl necklace. Her eyes were as brown as mine were, and her dark brown hair was long and thick.

I sat at the bar watching her set up her booth, a sales table to give out free shit and promote her company. Her boss was flirting with another girl across the room while I looked into her eyes. She kept looking away. Her heels were on point. Fashion pumps with a fresh pedicure. I noticed everything about her. Her earrings, blue hoops matched her suit. She knew what she was doing.

So naturally, I went over to her. We started talking about her company, what she was doing at this networking event, and all the blah topics, but I eventually got her to open up and with a few drinks, we were having a good time as the networking event ended.

What was funny throughout all of this, is the mask was slipping a bit on her. She was obviously a drinker, party girl, but it was amazing how little it took for her to let her hair down and get out of her “business” mindset that made her nervous and unsure about herself.

Liquid courage does it every time.

Sure, she said she had a boyfriend, but she wasn’t acting like it. Touching my leg, whispering in my ear, other things that stated that she was unattached for the right guy.

There were other women there, but they weren’t as “hot” as she was. They didn’t command the room like she did. They were more homely, more reserved, less obnoxious, but they weren’t as hot as she was.

Men let women get away with a ton of shit when they’re hot.

This was the first 9 I had hit on, flirted with. My new found confidence, improved physique, and improving social skills were winning the day. This was what I had prepared for. This was the hotness I wanted in my life.

What I didn’t know at that time…..was that she was a 9, but she was also a damn handful.

I was just stoked to have pulled a hot girl. For months before, as I was working on my game and my approaches, I would go up to hot girls and be smacked down like a weak jumper in the paint. But, all of the sudden, the work was paying off, and I felt as if this was the big time that I was finally going to get some of that top-notch pussy that all the guys talk about.

Other women would look, try to get my attention, but I didn’t care. I had the hottest girl in the room flirting and touching me. Time to take this party on home and enjoy the spoils.

And enjoy I did. I’m sure we did things that her boyfriend didn’t get to do with her.

It was everything I had ever expected and more…..until I woke up the next morning.

Hot But Not Attractive

As I was learning, there was a difference in her attitude when she was not “in character” trolling for dudes in the dregs of the networking circuit. She would proudly claim “boyfriend” if her suitors were not properly attractive enough for her to deem worthy.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg. She was demanding. She had been used to men doing what she wanted because she was hot. When she came across a guy who didn’t, she immediately began the shit testing in earnest. And as I was finding out, she wasn’t a very deep person, meaning she kept her eyes on her phone one minute, and the mirror the next. She had tons of admirers….

As we started dating, I knew it wasn’t going to last very long. She wasn’t interested in anything but the attention she got from the guys she wanted. It was all about her, so it stood to reason that our little escapades weren’t going to last long at all.

Look, the sex was great. Her body and face would make me hard in a heartbeat, and I’d spend quite a few hours pounding away at her. But after the release, my post nut clarity (h/t to Donovan Sharpe for that little nugget) told me this girl was trouble.

Her liberal, “empowered”, independent woman mindset was getting older by the minute.

She belched like a trucker, she was a fucking slob, she was jealous of other girls who I spoke with, all while chatting away with other guys (of which I was slowly not giving a shit). I was under the impression of the many guys in PUA who had told me, “Dude, no matter how hot she is, some dude, somewhere, is tired of her shit.”

She would constantly try to start shit, even when we were out together at dinner. She would shit test incessantly just to try to get a rise out of me. Her self-esteem hinged on being able to challenge me at every opportunity, and it was getting tiresome.

The final straw came when one night, she decided to start talking shit to me when I was at a dinner event with some friends. I wasn’t going to stand for this anymore. So as she started to escalate, I left. And I never looked back to her.

I felt like I had won a prize at first, but then I felt as if the prize wasn’t as pristine and great as it had led me to believe.

She was high maintenance, an attention whore, a slob, and a deeply flawed human being.

But at least she was hot, right?

She would constantly challenge me in front of people, hoping I would erupt and fight back. Constant shit testing became a wear on my nerves.

But at least she was hot, right?

The sex was great. She was extremely good-looking. And I forgave many things she did because her ass looked good in a dress and she wore the heels I liked. But she was always on her phone, talking to who knows, planning her next dude, and this temporary fun time proved the point of the manosphere that “she’s not yours, it’s just your turn” was real as fuck.

But at least she was hot, right?

As I grew older, wiser, and dated more, I found out some things about women that I needed to find out. As soon as the leash of a dead marriage was off of me, I started to go all out in search of the hot women, because I was told they would make me happy. Having hot sex with a hot girl was what life was about. And in some way, yes, I’m glad I experienced it with her, but in many other, mounting cases, there was a reason she was single with a boyfriend for convenience.

Attractive But Not Hot

So after repeating this approach with hot women, and understanding that there were issues with the women I was dating, I started to up my own qualifications. No longer was it just about being a hot woman, it was about more than that. I started to look deeper into the women I was hitting on.

The thrill of banging a hot woman was getting old now. I understand that there are many men who would’ve killed to be in these positions and that I was looking a gift horse in the mouth if I wasn’t going to use my newfound powers to plow different girls, but I just didn’t see the benefit, especially if my mental stability was at stake.

So I pulled back. I regrouped and focused on what I really wanted in a woman that wasn’t being proudly displayed in public.

I started to talk to women and hit on them if I truly was attracted to them. The women I walked by so many times before at the networking events, at the restaurants, at the bars, that weren’t as hot, but were still good looking, were the ones I would talk to.

Many of them were non-starters, but more than enough of them were better and less work than the 8’s and 9’s I had struggled with.

And I was getting better with all women, but I was also raising my personal standards with women. I wasn’t going to just sleep with a woman for the hell of it, because while it was fun, the price of getting my dick wet wasn’t worth the mental anguish I was getting by dating these girls.

I was looking for a “Ride or Die”, a woman who would come into my world and be willing to be a part of it. It was her call. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t say I’d take a few hotness points less for a woman who would support me and be my “Ride or Die.”

As the old adage goes, “I’d rather date a 6 or 7 than put up with an 8 or a 9.”

There’s something to be said about a woman who has her shit together and is attractive in other ways besides looks. I’ve seen women who were a 5 or 6 who were more feminine, softer, and more attractive than the hottest 8 or 9. That’s because attitude either adds or subtracts from a woman. The hottest girl can be the most unattractive asshole if she opens her mouth. Hotter girls are more entitled, as they’ve had men waiting on them hand and foot for much of their lives.

As I’ve always said, the most unattractive hot girl is one that knows it.

Humility and being humble are extremely attractive in women.

Look, I’m not saying find the ugliest, fattest chick you can get because she might be attracted to you. You’re allowed to have standards. But be aware of the hot girls and the baggage they bring with their looks.

As a guy, it’s important for you to sow your oats. And yes, getting experience with hot women is what every guy wants. But be aware that it’s not everything.

Get your dick wet with a hottie. And if you’re lucky enough to find a hot girl that is actually humble and has it all together, hold on to her like grim death.

There are unicorns out there, they just need to be attracted by a beast of a man.