Emotions

We are all infected.

The Walking Dead is one of the most popular TV-series in the world right now. It is a show about survivors of a zombie apocalypse and their struggle to stay alive... at least on the surface. However, underneath all the blood and gore is actually a show about egos and the stress we feel when things in life don’t go as planned (as usually is the case). One of the strongest themes underlying the show is growth of egomaniacal characters in their quest to “survive”.

The show brings up questions that draw a fine line between what it takes to survive and what it means to go too far. The show is just a fiction, but part of its appeal is that it reflects a lot of people’s concerns and struggles with the question of “what is really necessary?” and “what is egomaniacal?”

One of the main concepts of the show is “we are all infected”, which we can translate roughly to: we are all one mistake or slip away from becoming someone else’s nightmare. If we give up, quit, become a burden, choose an easy path to “survival”, we become the problem for the few left who haven’t.

Are we takers? Or do we walk the line?

Well, for those of you who don’t watch the show, don’t worry, I only bring it up because the topic of this article is egomania, and the famous line “we are all infected” is a good starting point for discussing it.

The number one problem beginners and intermediate guys have with seduction is that they believe they are immune to egomania and don’t need to address it. You think you couldn’t possibly be a bad guy and so never consider that it’s quite possible you are.

Beginners complain and whinge and cry about how THEY are special, about how THEY are the exception to every rule, because they are overwhelmed and surprised by the sheer aggressiveness of reality and how HARD it bitch slaps them into taking responsibility onto their shoulders.

Guys will resort to anything to avoid real improvement:

• Ask a girl they only sort of like to marry them
• Abandon responsibilities as a decent dad and become a drunk
• Avoid women entirely and resort to a porn oasis to get by
  

Our mistakes often aren’t THAT drastic, normally it is a bit of cynicism here, a few nasty edged decisions there, and an indulgence on occasion that screws over someone you don’t know now and then.

You figure, “Hey? What is the harm?” and you get into the habit of sucking, until one day a responsibility is too big, and BAM, you become the bad guy you swore you never would be.

Egomania is a real thing and you START OFF infected.

If you’re a red-blooded heterosexual male who has ever interacted with a female, you will likely agree with the spiritual guru and relationship coach David Deida when he describes the differences between masculine and feminine thinking as like being in two completely different universes.

The good news is, for perhaps the first time ever, we can truly begin to understand how females think and the reasons why. We’ve learned to translate certain female thought patterns and actions into something much more comprehensible to the average masculine mind.

I would love to see the topic of Female Neuropsychology taught to men at school! Many marriages would be saved and many couples would be happier. While that’s not likely in the near future, let me try to shed some light on this complex topic for you.

Since the beginning of time, women have tended to be more refined in their understanding of male sexual neuropsychology; they simply needed such skills for physical survival in a world dominated by large, aggressive men. Women are usually completely silent about their deep knowledge of the male psyche and sexuality though. I believe this silence – playing the fool, as it were – is the result of two factors:

• The female need to manipulate the male into a Provider role for reasons of survival; and

• The female need for social acceptance, or “Social Status Preservation” (aka Anti-Slut Defense), whenever female promiscuity is punished. The corollary to Anti-Slut Defense in women is the Madonna/whore Complex in men, which I will discuss at length in a later article.

Welcome back to the journey! Hope you enjoyed the loving in the last article.

So far, we’ve covered:

• In Part 1: how to become arrogant and eradicate fear

• In Part 2: the myth of the heartless player and the risks of arrogance

• In Part 3: how to cultivate humility and temper arrogance

• In Part 4: how to love people, learn from them, and take responsibility for others’ feelings

Before we start to develop a healthy love for women, we’re going to identify the venomous thoughts we have about them... because all these things are deep, entrenched obstacles to happy relationships, a stable psyche, and true, breakout, to-the-rooftops-good success.

Many people wonder whether or not their relationship is healthy. They ask themselves:

• “Am I with the right person?”
• “Are we truly compatible?”
• “Is this relationship headed in the right direction?”
• “Am I making the right decision by being with this person?”

These are all valid, albeit difficult, questions to answer.

So today, I wanted to do something a little bit different. I wanted to flip the script a bit and format this post as a questionnaire. I’ve called it, oh-so-creatively, The Healthy Relationship Questionnaire. It is designed to show you the positive aspects of a healthy relationship AND the negative aspects of an unhealthy relationship, in order to help you gauge what kind of relationship you are in.

The most important key here is to be honest with yourself about your situation. Now, that may sound easy, but there is something about love that seems to throw logic and clear thinking right out the window. But all I ask is that you do your best.

For each positive category you find yourself in, you will get one (1) point. For each negative category, you will get zero (0). At the end we will tally up your points and you can see the results as to how healthy – or unhealthy – your relationship may be.

So let’s get to it!

Welcome back, gentlemen.

In Part 1 of this series we explored the power of arrogance and how to get it.

Then in Part 2 we explored the inevitable consequences of exercising arrogance.

To recover from that prideful fall, we looked at how to cultivate humility in Part 3, a sheathe for our fearless determination and a crucial step in surpassing the “jerk”.

Now we’re going to learn how to love people.

As men, we often want to solve every little detail when it comes to women, especially when we are feeling cynical (when we don’t try in life). You don’t think you deserve it, you don’t want to hear confirmation that you suck, you just want to stay deaf, dumb, and blind. How can things ever work out unless you hold the MAGIC answers? How can you ever be good enough unless you can prove it? How can you progress at all if you don’t know everything there is to know?

You think you are doomed because you don’t know it all, and so you want all the details; you want to have it all figured out ahead of time. But what if I told you, the details will only get you to the fight. What if I told you that the fight you will then enter will suck and hurt, and all your obsessive planning will be minimally useful from this point on. Would you still rush to know it all, knowing it will only get you out of the frying pan and into the fire?

Sometimes we feel so compelled towards our desire for solutions and the truth that we cannot help but feel the allure of being a cynic, at least temporarily. So in this article I am going to explain to you why positivity is more valuable than every little detail about something you can find... and we’ll also discuss why it’s such an important tool to master and practical applications of it in our dating lives.

Howdy folks,

In Part 1 of this series we covered how one can utilize the virtue of arrogance to kill the weakness within. In Part 2 we experienced the pain of misusing arrogance.

Here in Part 3 we will discuss humility, the sheath that can reign in the sword of arrogance.