Confidence

Women are instinctively attracted to men with dark triad qualities. But you don’t have to be a psychopath to capitalize on that. The first step is learning to not care.

Have you ever felt like you’re being watched? Like Big Brother or the Eye of Sauron is gazing down upon you, judging your actions, biding its time before sending in the Gestapo to whisk you off to some dungeon?

You’re not alone.

This is what many men feel like when they’re doing pickup. That they’re being watched, and what they’re attempting to do is so morally reprehensible that it’s practically criminal. The current political climate adds to these fears, no doubt.

It’s such a common issue that I’ve written dozens of articles and could probably write an entire book on the subject. I might call it:

The Unapologetic PUA: How to Not Care What People Think

In regards to picking up girls, if you want to be great at it, you have to not care what anyone thinks about you. You must be:

• Not in your head worrying yourself out of approaching
• Present, calm, and charming when you do approach

It’s what men spend years attempting to master. To become soulless approach-robots with one aim in life: to have sex with hot girls!

There are many common errors men make in dating. These errors sabotage in small ways or large ways with women. The errors put guys through endless frustrations... usually of their own doing.

We'll talk about an error today in the way guys often think about "next time." Because it's sort of a big one, but it's likely one you won't stop to reconsider too often.

If you sift back through your memories, I bet you will find instances where you thought "I'll do it next time." See a beautiful girl? "I'll talk to her next time." Talk to beautiful girl? "I'll ask her out next time." On a date with beautiful girl? "I'll ask her home next time." Home alone with beautiful girl? "I'll make a move on her next time." As soon as you read these, I know you know the thoughts are counterproductive. If you're like most men, you still have them sometimes anyway though, don't you?

What's not included are the 'next time' thoughts you don't have. Like "That girl rejected me, but I'll get it next time." Or "My approach sucked. Next time will be better." Or "It's all gone tits-up with this girlfriend. But I'll do things right with my next one."

Men have these 'positive next time' thoughts far less often than they should. Yet they are a key to staying sane in the moment, and heading off neediness before it crops up.

Guys get told they’re guilty of horrible double standards all the time. But are double standards actually a bad thing… and are they even real?

There is a strange phenomenon in urban places. Double standards come under attack.

Not all double standards, mind you. But certain ones.

Before you can put new beliefs in, first you must push past old bad beliefs that conflict. But what if you don’t even know you have them?

There are two sides to learning.

On the one hand, there's learning something new. This side is important. You need to learn new strategies to get what you want. You need new techniques. You must give yourself new mindsets, new behaviors, and new mental models. All this is vital.

There's another side though that's a lot more overlooked. This side is in many ways even more important than the first side (learning), because without it, the first side is tough or impossible. This second side is that of unlearning. It is the art of deprogramming.

Everyone knows when a cult member makes it out of a cult, he has to go through a long period of deprogramming. This is worst for children raised within that cult, where the cult is all they've ever known. People raised in a religion who reject that religion go through it. People raised outside religion who later embrace it go through it too. The unlearning -- the deprogramming -- is as crucial as and in many ways more crucial than the learning. Until a man deprograms himself of old beliefs, he doesn't have the room to take on much in the way of new ones.

Deprogramming lies at the heart of switching from an ineffective way of trying to get what you want to an effective way.

Yet, sometimes, some men are wholly resistant to deprogramming.

And when you can't deprogram a man, you can't reprogram him either.

Which is bad for all sorts of reasons, if his old program is not a good, useful, helpful one for him.

If you're exclusively a monogamous sort of guy, this article won't apply to you at all.

However, if you ever find yourself in situations where you have one or more women you see regularly for sex, yet you're still on the dating scene, looking for new girls to pair up with, you will encounter this.

It's a phenomenon we might call The Girlfriend Pickup Dip.

The Dip looks like this: once you have a woman or two to tend to your sexual needs regularly, your motivation to seek new sex partners begins to dry up.

You grow less driven to secure new girls. Your tolerance for dating-related difficulties (like women flaking, testing you, or sending you mixed signals) erodes.

You may still go out, but the hunger isn't there. It's harder to get higher caliber women, too, despite everything you've been told: that high caliber women like guys who aren't needy, that women want men other women want, that women can 'smell' success... despite these things, when your drive isn't there, women can sense it, and that's the biggest thing. Because high caliber women want men who value them highly, and are willing to put a minimum level of investment in to get them.

Thus, as an almost inevitable consequence, as you bring more women into your life, and 'fill your pipeline' or 'fill up your rotation', you reach a point where your motivation to keep adding new women falls, and you are less-good at getting the really top notch girls you got at your hungriest, as well as just doing the same volume of new girls in general.

This is The Dip, and if you like multiple women in your life, it can be a thorn in your side.

A recent article on loneliness exploded to the top of Hacker News (the Reddit-like programming and entrepreneurship newsboard). The article clearly struck a chord. The thrust of the article was that the decline of the family has led to an epidemic of lonely people.

In the comment section below the article, a reader had this to say:

After numerous attempts to find a reasonable/semi-normal female "life-companion" I gave up at 50. I tried to overlook the hostility and conceit they had towards men in general at first, until neurosis and personality disorders would reveal themselves later - if the relationship got that far. I felt like I was in a competition and she was determined to "win".

It's many things, but the enmity and distrust that feminism has caused between men and women is by far the most significant contributor. Men are the "enemy" that must be defeated. Why are the majority of homeless white men? They surrendered.

It's a sentiment that seems to be bursting out of the stitches among more and more people. Women express similar sentiments as often as men -- this isn't a purely male issue.

At the core of it, the real center of the issue, is the cultural phenomenon of 'trust collapse'.

The great tragedy of our time is this breakdown in trust between the people... and, particular to this website's mission, the breakdown in trust between the sexes. When the sexes trust each other, anything is possible. When they do not, society comes undone at the seams.

The sexes have battled throughout history; a little tension is nothing new. Yet rarely does the fight grow as embittered as it's today become.

Today more and more women are distrustful toward men. They worry there are rapists behind every tree. They opine that women are paid less than men (and thus, implicitly undervalued). They jump when a stranger approaches, or chide men not to walk up to them in the first place. At the same time, they wonder where the good men have gone, and instruct men that now that they are ready to marry, it's time for those men to be ready too.

Just as women's trust in men has crumbled, so too has men's in women. Many men fear false accusations of harassment (described as "sometimes just a different perspective" in this article), false accusations of sexual assault, or false accusations of rape. Men with good careers walk on eggshells around female colleagues, wary not to become easy prey for unscrupulous corporate climbers (all a woman has to do is say a man did something to her, the same way the football player feigns injury to penalize his opponent and benefit his own team). Many men fear the power women wield in marriage courts, and the loss of their children and assets and lives in the event of a divorce. Some swear off marriage under current Western law; others swear off dating entirely. In a recent 'sexual harassment backlash' survey by the very feminist Lean In organization, 60% of male managers report now being uncomfortable mentoring, working alone with, or socializing outside of work with female employees.

While not everyone has caught it as bad as the more sensitive (and paranoid) among us, everyone has felt it to some extent. And plenty have felt it to large extent... between 2008 and 2018, a mere 10 year gap, the number of 18-29 year old men not having sex in America rocketed up from 10% of them to a whopping 28%.

As the relations between the sexes have increasingly frayed, more and more individuals have come out as preferring their own same sex instead. That number increased by 17% in only four years, between 2012 and 2016. Among millennials, in 2012, 5.8% were homosexual; just four years later, in 2016, a full 7.3% were out of the closet (so much for the ol' "only 1-2% of the population is gay" chestnut you used to hear, huh?). And the fertility rate in the U.S. hits new all-time lows pretty much every year.

How do make heads or tails of all this?

What is happening to the mating market in the West?

Is there any sense we can make of this at all, or is it all just a bunch of unfathomable deep civilizational processes, layers beneath layers, impossible to peel back?

Well, we're going to peel the layers back. And we'll see if we can arrive at an understanding of just what's afoot in all these tremors we've felt in the modern mating market.

Fortunately, there are white polished stones that lead the way us to follow. Let's see where those stones lead.

Sometimes we put on facades because our genuine self sucks. Other times because we don’t want to appear ordinary. Can one become both genuine and extraordinary?

What is the difference between being the genuine article and being just a good fake? Before discussing this, let’s throw out the moralistic rulebook of society that says being a fake causes people to gasp audibly and say “Shame on you!” Instead, let’s be real here.

Putting on a facade doesn’t make you a bad guy. It doesn’t necessarily make you anything out of the ordinary, but therein lies the issue – the ordinary. In a world where ordinary often comes up short, is boring, and disappoints, it ought not be the aim, right?

For some, being ordinary is a shield; it is a way we can justify our actions and focus on activities that yield an ordinary result, but a result nonetheless. Ordinary is safe. We relax in the classification of our acts being ordinary because by default it means, no one SHOULD make a fuss, or else they are the crazy one, and if they act crazy trying to take you on, they act crazy trying to take on the whole world.

So it is no small wonder, then, that when we put on a facade, we do so with some sense of reassurance. Every other guy has done it, and if they haven’t, they either should have or are a liar trying to put rules on you they never intend to follow themselves.

And we all know that being the genuine article is preferable, but should we suffer while we try to get to that place more than we already do? Often the answer to this debate in our head comes to a close rather quickly – so quickly that it might not even be a conscious thought. We therefore hold no accountability for the choice and can leave it aside without worry of it ever coming back to bite us. Or can we?