Growth

I was as bad as you can get with women.

Kissed the first girl at 18.

First date at 19.

Lost my virginity at 27.

My social awkwardness and ineptitude shown through every time.

At 22, I took a first date to dinner and then to my new home being built. That was my plan, and she silently seethed as I told her the layout and how I was so proud.

“Take me home, okay?”

Dated a bigger girl just to try and lose my virginity because my friends ragged on me. Got cold feet after taking her to a friends wedding and had another friend do the deed and take her home because I couldn’t bring myself to have sex with her.

Went out with a girl 4 times and we never even kissed, just did awkward things and chatted as friends over dinner until I invited myself to her house and ghosted her before I came over.

Embarrassing fails, then came my ten year marriage and the trials and tribulations with 4 of those years being nearly sexless (1-2 a year) and my continual struggle with women, as I saw it, was the cause.

During and after my separation and my divorce I stopped giving a damn. Broke, depressed and downtrodden, I let any girl with a passable face and a penchant for saying yes in my life, and these broken women made it even more miserable.

But hey, at least I was getting laid?

Then, I discovered the Red Pill, and Pick Up Artistry.

As I got better with, the women got hotter, but also more fucked up.

My definition of success was to “get good with women”. I had no other goals beyond that. I had no aspirations for a healthy relationship because I honestly thought that just be getting good with women, all the other things would take care of themselves. After all, it wasn’t me, it was the women I was meeting, right?

Tried to fake it at first. Faked my way right into the friend zone in LA. Then back to the dead zone for having the temerity of being a player with multiple leads.

But I was having a blast, and enjoying something that had eluded me for my whole life, the experience of dating multiple women.

So, consider it a checkmark on a box that I had set out with long ago.

But it’s not, and will not be for me, considered a success.

Because all it did was bring on more problems, bigger problems. The short term brought me more sex, more women, but in the end, it brought me no closer to a long term relationship. It merely told me that I could have as many short term flings as I wanted, but that I wasn’t going to be loved, nor would I love anyone, because love is weak. Love is for men who have feelings, who have emotions, and who are simps.

And for as much fun as I was having, this was the bottom line. You have to always be hard, emotionless, and use dread game to keep your woman in line, because “all women are like children”, and they need to be in the “presence of someone who can tell them what to do”. “They won’t ever love you the way you want”, nor will they give you the deep, meaningful love you seek.

As I’ve found, PUA and LTR are incompatible terms.

In PUA, you get what you wish for, but you also get dead ends that don’t lead to anywhere good, because it all boils down to playing the game in the shallow end, when really what you need to learn is to swim in the deep end, and then you get to jump off the diving board.

As part of my journey, I’m having to deprogram myself from PUA thinking and it’s been incredibly difficult. With every passing day, I still catch myself using pick up terms, lines of thinking, even trying to be mindful on how I’m communicating to women because many of the ones who I would be willing to have a LTR with are turned off by these statements.

“The NOTCH is the GOAL”

PUA thrives on escalation, quick and extensive, in order to get to the almighty notch.

And it doesn’t matter HOW or WHO you get it with, just that you get those numbers.

And this goes with everything, approaches, either cold or lukewarm, day game, everything, because the bottom line is hasn’t changed, it’s not about getting you comfortable with talking to women, it’s about getting you comfortable talking to women then sleeping with women.

Because it’s really all about the notch.

When you get the notch, you can brag to the community about it, because you’re doing hard things. And they pat you on the back and you go out and do it again and again. But notice when they get the notch, notice how it doesn’t fulfill anything but going out and getting another one.

The beautiful unicorn is the goal, but it isn’t having a relationship with her, it’s about landing her for even a brief moment (she’s not yours, it’s just your turn) and moving on to another one.

If you’ve read “The Game” by Neil Strauss, he got so good at picking up women that it became nothing fulfilling in his life. Only when he started to have feelings for women did he start to understand the consistent dead end of this lifestyle. And by that time, the damage was done. Many PUA’s have had horrible relationships, including Mystery, because they didn’t understand that simping doesn’t die simply because you said it does. They didn’t understand that self mastery and “fake it until you make it” don’t jive in real life. They became personas, never found the real “them” and tried to apply that to all parts of their lives, with horrible results. So now it’s “don’t catch feels” and everything is cool. And it’s led to an absolute mess of a dating scene.

Look, I get it, some guys want this lifestyle and die with a smile on their face after climax. But it isn’t realistic, nor is it sustainable. Which is why many of your gurus are happily married (or at least pretend to be) with one woman. If you can pull of haram game go for it, but a majority of guys just want a ride or die to support them, love them, and be there for them. We can argue all we want about monogamy being a broken concept, but the fact remains that a majority of this world still believes in it, and as a man who didn’t believe after his divorce, I am a believer too.

Quite simply, the long term love of one trumps the fleeting love of many. It’s shallow, empty, short lived and transparent. And it gets old. You’re the dude in the club at 55, with the pony tail, who fucked his way through the city in the early 00’s, and now you’re hoping for that magic to rub off. But all you’re getting are ladies from the retirement bus, because you never bothered to make a life for yourself, a real life, and lose all the other bullshit that worked for a while, but has since stopped. There’s only one Hugh Hefner, and you ain’t it, and even after that, man made it seem as if this was the life, the world that every man wanted, even as Hef bungled his way through different marriages and arrangements.

“But at least he was getting laid by beautiful women.”

Men consistently have trouble getting laid, and this was the deficiency that PUA was supposed to eradicate. But it took the feels from the game, and it took the reason for being and boiled it down to whether she spreads her legs for you on the first date, whether you’re getting that girl in accounting to go down on you after a meeting, or whether that girl you approached on the street is a “good girl” that you have no shot with. It’s a “Dear Penthouse” that men dearly want but can’t get. It tried to quantify EVERYTHING, so that you can just look at the numbers to see what women are doing, how they act, and how a majority of them believe in “monkey branching”. Hypergamy doesn’t care, until you realize that the majority of women who we blame for hypergamy were broken human beings in the first place, with either bad upbringings, domineering or no fathers, and have no interest in taking responsibility for any of it.

And if you dare to believe in monogamy, you’re labeled blue pill and you’re doomed.

However…..

I’ve seen, in person, many men who have good women in their lives, and I see what it can do for them.

With some PUA, dishonesty was a hallmark. “Don’t tell women anything you’re doing” was the go to. Then, it was “you spin multiple plates and tell them up front what you’re doing”, but brutal honesty only works in a progressive, dystopian dating market where everyone’s trying to fuck everyone else.

You may win in the meat market, but you lose in the life partner game.

And I want to win in that game. Because it’s what I want to do.

The Reality

Nothing punched me in the face more than when I was trying to get into a real relationship and the reality of my PUA programming came up.

Women looking for a relationship don’t want to hear that you’re fucking other women and they can just take that to the bank.

And why would they?

I consistently say to men that if they found out a woman they were dating was screwing other dudes, they would be a bit concerned. And yet, many modern women do just this, and get upset when men do it as well. But it’s not ideal whoever does it, and while it shows disastrous double standards in dating, it also shows how detached we all are over sex and healthy long term relationships, and how the lines have blurred for everyone.

But the reality….the reality is much better than what the gurus tell you or want you to believe.

The Notch you get from strange women is much worse that the sex you have in a relationship.

Why? Because in a deep, committed relationship, you and your significant other open up sexually, and sex can be anything you want.

But they don’t want you to know that. Why? Because hate and anger sell. It’s easier to blame others for your lot in life than to take responsibility for yourself.

But more, it’s easier to sell gimmicks to guys who don’t want to do the work.

If you read “The Game”, you saw that in Los Angeles, when hundreds of men tried to get some of that genie in the bottle that was released, women started catching on to the ruse. Men who had used old time favorite pickup stuff like “The Cube” were suddenly being outed by women they were trying to hit on.

IT GETS OLD.

It’s cliché, but it’s true. We see men dropping out of PUA and the old guard weeps not because guys are doing what’s best for them, but because they miss the old days when they were hitting up models and actresses in the streets of the cities they haunted. Guys understand there are useful things in both PUA and the red pill, but it’s not a place they need to stay at for long. Because time doesn’t stop in those worlds, and eventually it becomes old, boring, and less important that a man getting on with his life.

“Get good with women” is and was the only end game, and once you get there, you’re adrift again because you’ve hit the mark and now you have nowhere else to go. You see men who in their prime were the best PUA’s ever, now reduced to shells of men talking about the days of game like a 43 year old over the hill dude talks about his 4 TD passes in the high school state championship.

Men have to have forward motion, they can’t just rely on inertia or momentum, because it ensures they’ll be stuck forever. Some guys can pull it off. But most cannot.

And instead of giving them consistent tools for building and growing a good life, they give them tips and tricks to get to that next phase, and drop them off like a bus stop. And we wonder why many guys are bitter about what’s happened to them.

You have to think past the notch. The best notches come at the hands of a woman who loves, supports, and is there for you. Men, married men that I know, that have taken control of their lives and become patriarchs, are having the best sex in life. Because they have a trusted person whom they break bread with every day, and they have someone who believes in them and what they are doing.

They’re having hot sex after breakfast, instead of hoping the fat girl at the end of the bar at last call is drunk enough to go home with you.

They’re going on amazing trips and doing fun things with their families, instead of getting high at a friend’s house before going out to the club to see if you can pull some girl younger than 35 tonight.

They’re having children, instead of pulling out and hoping that next phone call isn’t the girl you had sex with saying she’s late.

They’re living their lives, moving on and growing in other directions instead of harkening back to the halcyon days of when they had a threesome while high on cocaine.

I choose the group who’s creating more in the present, instead of remembering the good times, and I won’t apologize for it. It’s my choice to move forward and be more than I could have ever imagined, and there are women, many women, out there that I don’t have to dazzle with a card trick or a palm reading to get them to look. I am the game, and many women are eager to play.

Get out of the past, get passed the notch, and get on with your life.

Or be doomed to stay in the same place, in the same world, in the same dull life, forever.

I was fucking pissed.

The freight wasn’t going to fit, and I knew it, and my boss knew it, and he called me on it.

It didn’t help the sting of all the effort I put into the truck, nor did it help the fact that I was convinced it would fit but didn’t. I didn’t want to admit I was wrong, so I spazzed out at my boss when he called me on it.

I raised my voice. I punched the wall. I threw a fit like a fucking child.

My boss, my best friend at the time, should’ve fired me on the spot. He was right. He knew what I was doing wasn’t going to work, and even after he told me several times, I still fucking tried to prove him wrong.

And I failed miserably. And rather than take the correct approach and understand that I had miscalculated the load fitting in the truck, I instead punched the wall and threw a tantrum.

And it wasn’t the first time. I think if I had been in any other job, at any other time, my ass would have been unemployed faster than you can say “inappropriate conduct”. But because it was my family’s business, I got a pass, and continued to get a pass, all while knowing that even if I was frustrated and acted like a little kid, I’d not face any major implications for that behavior. So I never really learned how to handle criticism properly.

It happened throughout my life with the same results. I didn’t believe that I needed to learn anything, I thought I knew it all already (many times a symptom of just being young), but it was also how I was raised and taught in school that really got me into trouble for later in my life.

I was a rule follower. I rarely got into trouble in school, and when I did, it was so stressing and disastrous to me, that I swore I wouldn’t ever do it again. So I stayed on the straight and narrow, doing so well that I really never needed to be corrected, to the point that when anyone tried to correct me, I got upset and shut down.

And the monster it created was one that I didn’t like to show, but was forced to often when I was challenged later on in college and at my job.

But why the fuck did I go into a rant every time someone tried to give me any type of criticism, warranted or otherwise?

Why did I consistently put up my defenses when anything regarding me was questioned or criticized?

And why, in today’s society, is this the default reaction to anyone who has valid criticisms about us?

Why Don’t We Like Criticisms?

Why do we take on a defensiveness whenever we are criticized?

It’s a natural reaction for humans to react to any type of criticism with a defense mechanism to try and either disprove or attack the offending party.

We tend to take everything personal. And anything, from our work, to our bodies, to our attitudes, to anything that involves us, is fair game. We feel it hurt when someone criticizes us. Just like getting rejected, we take is personally and it makes us rethink our own attitudes about ourselves.

And if we continue to hear bad things about ourselves, we tend to dwell on those things and give them validity though, many times, they don’t have any.

We seldom get criticized by people we love, but when we do, it tends to hurt more than if it were just a stranger.

And these days, we are surrounded by people, especially on the internet, that use an anonymous mask to throw insults that we all take way too seriously.

When I first started on Twitter, I would let complete strangers tell me how I did things and criticize me, and I would let it affect me. So just like at my job, I would lash out and call these people names, not even knowing who the hell they were.

All because I thought it hit close to home even when it didn’t.

So that day, and the many days before, that I had gotten into trouble for doing something that I thought was right, only to be corrected by a boss or co-worker, built up and got me more and more defensive, turning a fit into a tantrum and a punch to a wall or fight with another person.

If I was ever going to master myself, I was going to have to understand that taking criticism, especially from people who are trying to help you, is a sign of maturity that people need to have in order to grow.

So I had to relearn this lesson, starting with taking criticism and understanding good criticism and bad criticism.

Maturity And Accountability

So, I had to hear things.

And I had to put myself around people who were concerned with me being my best.

And I had to understand that when I was wrong, I needed to own up to it and try not to do it again.

But it took a dose of growing the fuck up to understand that I needed to take criticism to be better. But I also had to identify which criticism was valid and which was just bullshit. I had to know who I was and be around people who were interested in seeing me as a better person to understand which criticism was truth and which were lies.

It all started with me being comfortable with myself and finding a tribe of people, friends, and family, that were interested in seeing me grow.

I didn’t need people to spare my feelings, I just needed people to tell me what I needed to do in order to improve. And I had to take their comments with a chest out and a chin up. It wasn’t ever personal, it was trying to help me improve.

But most of all, I needed to be held accountable when I fucked up. And I needed to understand that when I fucked up, the best approach was to admit to it, find the fault and correct it so it didn’t happen again. I wasn’t infallible, no one is.

How did I respond to criticism after understanding that it was being used to help me minimize my flaws and maximize my strengths?

I responded by understanding that my goal was to improve myself. When I finally understood that criticism was REQUIRED for me to become the best version of myself, it became easier to take and also was used to help me.

I understood that criticism was really “feedback” from those who wanted to see me at my best.

And as I developed a sounding board that would help me be my best, the ability to take and use criticism became a superpower that I used whenever I had a setback.

I needed to have it to see my faults and fix them.

I needed to have accountability so that I could stop fucking up and get my shit together.

Taking criticism is a necessity for anyone who wants to get better.

Just find a group that wants to see you succeed, a mentor who wants to see you better, and ignore the anonymous haters who throw bombs just to throw them.

You will be a better person when you accept you have things you have to work on.