Emotions

“I’ve got a question for you.”

The cute older waitress smiles at me expectantly.

“Yes?”

“You see those three girls sitting at the table over there?”

She follows my eyes, sees the girl, and then nods at me.

“What do you think would happen if I went over there and said hi. Would that be weird?”

She smiles, giggles, and responds:

“No, I think that would be really awesome of you actually. Not a lot of men would do that.”

I smile. I don’t need her permission, but I’m curious. I continue,

“What do you think I should say?”

She thinks for a moment and laughs,

“I don’t know! I guess just introduce yourself or... yeah, I’m not sure!”

I smile again. I know exactly what I’m going to say.

Ever see the film Vicki Cristina Barcelona? If not, stop reading and go watch it. In my favorite scene, the sultry Spaniard Juan Antonio exchanges slews of sexy glances with the adventurous and flirty Cristina. All the while, Cristina’s uptight and reserved friend Vicki admonishes Cristina’s flirty behavior and flawlessly performs the role of a cautious and boring upper-middle class woman.

Recognizing Cristina’s overly obvious eye-fucking, Juan strolls over to their table. He looks lazily from one girl to the other, and then rests his eyes on Cristina and simply asks,

“American?”

His intonation barely registers as a question and is devoid of all fucks, drawing them both into his world. And despite some protest, he convinces them both to fly with him to Oviedo and spend the weekend with him. And, yes, he eventually smashes both of them.

I had to try it out myself. Not only did Juan’s bravado stir my Latin blood, but once I consider approaching a girl, very few reasons can stop me.

After paying my bill, I tell the waitress to wish me luck and walk over to the girls.

They all look up at me expectantly. I pause for an extra second, because why not, and then say simply, to no girl in particular,

”You from here?”

In my opinion there are two kinds of jealousy:

1. The kind you feel out of superficial insecurity, and
2. The kind you feel out of genuine loss

A lot of men feel jealous superficially and confuse it for something genuine. That is easy to fix, you just have to learn to move on. But occasionally some of us who are familiar with moving on get swept into a situation where genuine loss is felt, and no matter how hard we try we just can’t let it go.

In this article I’m going to talk about the second kind of jealousy and getting past the grief that comes with it.

One of the cycles familiar to lots and lots of people is the break-up-get-back-together cycle.

If you’ve been dating before, odds are you’ve gone through this once or twice (or thrice, or more) yourself.

Here’s how it works: you and a girlfriend break up. Then after a while, you realize how perfect she’d been for you, and reach out to her to get back together. Or, you’re plugging along in your single life, when she reaches out to you and wants to see you again.

Then pretty soon, you’re back together. For a few days or a few weeks, it’s as great as ever!

Then things go back to the way they were before the first time you broke up. If you initiated the breakup before, you may start wishing you’d stayed broken up. If she’d initiated the breakup before, you may notice she’s become annoyed with those same things about you that precipitated the initial breakup in the first place.

So you break up again. A little time goes by, and maybe you get back together again. Then maybe you break up again later.

Here’s a question you may not have asked yourself, though: why do you do this? And why does she do it?

Obviously it’s kind of a silly nonsense dance, isn’t it?

Either stay together, or stay broken up, right?

Yet you aren’t doing that. But why?

A reader commented on my article on backward rationalization about women’s frequent misremembering or twisting of past event details:

“This is a great article. As a rational man, with integrity, I struggle with this all the time. Young women will routinely misremember things that they said and did, in a way that allows them to not accept responsibility. They’ll conjure up conversations, filling in my words, for their benefit. Very often it is to save them from losing face. Other times it is so they can avoid confronting the truth about themselves. To me, this is lying, but if I’m mad about it, it’s some “loss of frame”.

I had a post about this on redpill reddit a few months ago, asking if you should ever question a girl about why she was dishonest, as it seems pointless. The consensus seems that you just tell a woman what she did, and that it wont be tolerated. When she argues, you ignore.”

What our reader here is remarking on is one of the core differences in how men and women perceive the world, and it’s one it’s tremendously important to have a handle on if you want to run your relationships with women well.

The understanding is this: how a woman remembers a past event has less to do with the facts of the event than it has to do with how she feels right now.

This sounds topsy-turvy and wrongheaded from a male perspective, because how on Earth can you expect to create a sane and stable world if the past shifts with the sands of your very emotions?

However, it serves a critical role in how women deal with the world, as well as with those around them.

“You wannafourfour?”

Around a year and a half ago, this Tinder message buzzes my phone as I drive back to school. I’m returning from a trial shift at a club I hope to work at for the upcoming summer.

Despite my good mood, however, I’m confused. What the hell is “fourfour”?

The girl messaging me is a cute blonde sorority girl who I’d set up a few dates with, but she always flaked. Save for a few run-ins on campus, we didn’t see each other much. Then we matched on Tinder, but it’d been days since I sent a message, with no reply. Now, at the tail-end of a Friday night, she’s messaging me to “fourfour”.

“She must be messing with me,” I think to myself.

As far as I can remember, I’ve always thought that the entire world was playing a prank on me. And women flirting with me and chasing me, well, that was just the cruelest of jokes. I feared that the moment I flirted back or asked them out, everyone around me, including the girl, would turn towards me, point their fingers, and laugh as they tease me “Oh you really thought she’d get with YOU?!” This was the insecurity that caged the seducer in me for far too long.

“Master Teacher You, who was forty-three years younger than the Master, said, “Being a person who is lovingly obedient toward his parents and who models himself on his elders, and being at the same time someone who is bent on defying his superiors, that’s unlikely. Being a person who is not bent on defying his superiors, but who has a passion for stirring up confusion and disorder, that doesn’t happen, either.”
– The Analects of Confucius, 1:2, translated by David R. Schiller”

We’ve talked on here about crazy girls before, and about narcissistic women and women with more extreme personality disorders.

Today I want to talk about where the seeds of many of the troublesome behaviors you’ll encounter in some women begin – namely, in the relationships they had with their mothers and fathers during childhood.

It’s not dwelt on too often in the dating advice community, but an individual’s family background and upbringing has tremendous follow-on effects that ripple down through the rest of her life, molding her relationships into something that mirrors the model she learned early on.

And that means that when it comes to predicting how a woman will behave – and especially, what kind of girlfriend she’ll make – you must pay close attention to how she grew up.

This one’s Part I of a 2-part special request for an old student of mine from Denmark.

We had the opportunity to catch up, about a week ago, after not having spoken in a while. One of the things we discussed was love at first sight; in particular, how frequently we experience it and whether it’s always been that way.

For me, love at first sight began as a spontaneous event that occurred maybe 2 to 4 times per year: I’d go around, most days nothing, but then, one day, some girl would pop out at me from the crowd, and she would be PERFECT. Even her flaws would be perfect. For whatever reason, I’d be crazy for her.

Over time, I’ve trained myself to spot girls I’ll get this feeling for even more readily, and now sometimes I’ll run into multiple girls I’ll get this feeling for in the course of a week. It’s certainly much more common than 2 to 4 times a year for me now. There are other factors involved than training, of course, too (preferring to spend time in big metropolises with lots of beautiful, fashionable women makes this much easier).

For my alumnus, it’s gone in the reverse direction: he used to feel it now and then until he met his high school girlfriend, a love-at-first-sight coupling that ended when she tore his heart out and stomped it underfoot at 17. At 35 and dozens of lays and relationships under his belt, he’s never felt ‘in love’ with a girl since, and never experienced love at first sight again.

I asked him, and do you think she just raised your standards so high no other girl can meet them, or do you think she just hurt you so bad you haven’t let yourself feel anything since?

He told me it was the latter.

I gave him my thoughts on getting some emotional freedom, and on training oneself to experience love at first sight more often. But he asked me if I could write an article on the subject too.

So here, it is, split into two parts: Part I, on stripping yourself of fear of love and romance, and next time, Part II, on finding more of those girls that you are just crazy about.