Emotions

In a comment on my article about unclear value to a long-term girlfriend, a reader named Xander remarked as follows:

“Can you believe that because of this I can never get a girl. I’m good looking guy, and I’ve been successful on college. I don’t write this because I think look and post bachelor title will get me girls, but because I try to seduce them, and because of this qualities they don’t like me. I’m not arrogant and have a lot of male friends. But girls don’t like me, and wouldn’t go on date with me to save their lives. Problem is that girls with lower ambitions wouldn’t go with be because of attainability, and girls who are a bit ambitious also don’t want, because they want someone less ambitious who they control and feel dominant around him. The biggest problem is my success at college, and my normal ambition to be good at my job and further education. So I can’t be their boyfriend because I equally want to provide me and them, or their lover because girls here clever guys treat like they don’t have a cock. Global crisis hit us and a lot of girls are in found provider mode, and they are too picky and only wants to date man who is completely same as they in all possible things. And as you know it’s impossible, they find one provider and eventually marry him. I realized that being good at science is one way ticket to auto-rejection.

Reading your article I realized that in all world women want compatible man, but here it is more than dramatic. Those are modern times and I think that women should be more flexible.

My problem is because I tried everything I could and did’t get results because of their ego. I know I shouldn’t but I started to really hate women because of their ego who is bigger than Mount Everest.

At one point I gave up from seduction, but this article tells me that maybe there is a chance. Please tell me Chase are there more things I can do or change so I could get better results? If you know some psychological books that treat problems about ego please tell me. Is there something in seduction I should focus more? I focused on social calibration and got a lot of male friends, but women still don’t like me because maybe I’m not calibrated enough, and for sure because they don’t like anyone who has evan a little bit value than they. Every answers, comments and critics are welcome.”

While long-term value is definitely an important part of whether a woman is willing to stick around in a long-term relationship with you, its effect on actually lining up dates with women and getting them into bed is... murkier. That’s because it’s quite hard to sniff out your real, actual long-term value from a mere five or ten minutes of conversation.

So, while it might sound like Xander’s problem is the opposite that discussed in this article, where we talked about men who say women don’t want them because they aren’t valuable enough, in many ways it is in fact the same problem:

The man is focused on himself, the man... instead of on her, the woman.

There’s a truly wonderful post (and equally wonderful comment section discussion) on LessWrong titled “Why startup founders have mood swings (and why they may have uses).” The authors describe the mood swings startup founders tend to go through, vacillating between euphoria and despair. I can certainly relate; in the course of running startups (such as Girls Chase), I’ve had plenty of opportunity to sit at both points on that spectrum. It’s kind of a taboo topic (nothing to make you sound unmanly like talking about mood swings), but hey, let’s tackle it.

The authors of the post above point to other examples when people are likely to experience similar mood swings:

• Early on in their first ever romantic relationship

• When deeply invested in furthering a devoted cause

• Whilst struggling to create a first great work of art or achieve something notable

And it stands out to me there’s another place endeavor I’ve experienced these same mood swings I’ve felt during my startup career, and that was during my first two or three years actively seeking improvement with girls.

I know a lot of other men go through this too, especially the men who have a burning desire to become ‘great’ with girls... or at least to improve their prospects markedly.

Yet many more men wash out of the seduction game early on, when the lows of the mood swing prove too much for them.

What I’d like to discuss in this article is why the mood swings get you, what you can expect when you apply yourself to improving with women, and how to stack the decks in your favor to prevent yourself from ‘washing out’.

A few weeks ago I read over a few of my posts from 2015. I noticed that most of them were about dealing with inferiority. Whether it was race, baldness, height, or build, the theme was “I feel inferior because ...”

Now my other posts were fine, they dealt with the symptoms of inferiority – but I didn’t write about how to get rid of the disease. Because of this, I wanted the first post I write for 2016 to be one that tackles this issue head on. Inferiority takes on many forms, it affects what decisions you make while talking to a girl, it affects how you plan your life, it affects how much success you will have and how you will feel about it.

“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.