| Sideways Like a Crab: The Non-Pursuit of Women and Happiness
I’ve been thinking about writing a post like this for a while now. But each time, something tells me, “No, just let it go. You’re done with pickup. Forget about it. You don't owe them anything.” Finally, months later, I'm still applying the techniques I’ve learned and still reminded by random bursts of info that this PUA thing exists. Maybe it would be interesting to start a thread about life after the game and the things I'm learning outside of pickup on being a man, being with women, and just being human. Read on.
I’ve been out of the game for almost a year now. Not that I disappeared or stopped getting girls; I just don’t consider myself a pickup artist or study pickup anymore.There were definitely some negative side effects of me learning pickup that I had to figure out how to deal with. But overall, I’ve realized that it has laid a foundation for a greater mission of self-improvement and self-actualization in life.
Lately I’ve been thinking about perspective and time in regard to habits. When I was into pickup, I wanted to get good right away. Wanted to be confident, funny, know all the right things to do and say, and shed my old skin in a snap. And even when I practiced meeting people, even when I studied with a coach, it seemed like I wasn’t getting where I wanted to be fast enough. Three reasons:
1) Hyperfocus and Outcome Dependency. When you’re meeting other people as a mission, it changes the premise of each interaction. It’s like those quantum particles that change physics when conscious attention is paid to them. (Gotta love Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.) Like Kanye says, "When you try hard, you die hard." When I tried to meet people, I'd burn up or burn out. It felt forced. Fortunately, as I've learned, meeting people is usually the byproduct of having a good time, something which is much easier to do.
2) It took a LONG ass time for those old habits to take root in my brain, all those old negative and socially awkward patterns imprinted onto neuropathways. So it took a while for the new ones to take root. Patience really is a virtue.
3) As much good as it can be to have a community of like-minded individuals, it can also breed ego wars and all the things that come with it – not the best fertilizer for true confidence. And it was only AFTER I left “the community” that I really internalized the difference between false confidence and true confidence.
I was in Mexico over the weekend. Traveled alone, took in some great scenery, wrote, meditated, met some cool people. By the third and last night I was there, I hadn’t hooked up, though. Oh well, I thought. Non-attachment. I got back from the beach and was chilling reading a book in the hotel lounge around 7pm when this girl walks by. “Hola,” we say to each other. She comes and sits on the other side of the couch, and we chat. She’s from a different Mexican city, also traveling alone and also leaving the next day. She speaks literally zero English.
Still, we chat for a bit in broken Spanish. (Of course chatting with a solo female or all-female set implies DHVs, that’s a given.) I bring her closer on the couch so we can show each other pictures on our phones. Light kino on the shoulder and a little on the leg by the end of the interaction. Playful push-pull. She tells me that English is hard to learn, so she doesn’t want to learn it. I motion like I’m stabbing myself in the heart. Later on she says she’s not all that interested in visiting the U.S. Stab-motion again. “Dos veces,” I said. “Tres y…” I start to get up as if I’m gonna walk away. “Noooo!” she says, and we both laugh and collapse back on the couch. I ask her what she’s doing that night, and she says going out. I say we should go out together. It’s about 7:30 by then and we make plans to go out at 10. Already had a good level of attraction and comfort in 30 minutes. Not that I was thinking any of that in the moment.
We meet at 10, she’s all done up and looks hot, and we go to this karaoke joint that she told me about. At first there are tons of gringos. So we have our own table, and I make friends with the big group of frat boys next to us. I sing a couple songs: one in Spanish for the locals and an 80s rocker to get the gringos on their feet. When I’m not singing we chat and kino some more. The place empties out, and only the locals are left. Then I tease her and say, “If you’re not going to sing then you have to dance,” and get up and motion for her to take my hand. We start dancing, I bring her in close, and she goes for the makeout. “I like you,” she says, and I say the same to her. I was ready to venue hop but she was ready to go. So at midnight, after 2.5 hours of face time, it's back to the hotel...
I went into a little more detail than I wanted to there. But as I reflected on that night the next day, I thought about a few things:
1) Relationships, like happiness as the J.S. Mill quote goes, should be approached sideways like a crab. I wasn’t focused on getting laid that night, just relaxing and enjoying myself. It was never in the bag until it was in the bag; and truthfully, it didn’t matter all that much if we had sex or not. It’s like that with all the girls I meet now. It’s a weird, paradoxical-type thing to act without attachment, but when it happens to you, it feels so great. Because of this, I take my time, and usually this results in less LMR because she’s the one who’s craving for it to happen.
2) Over the course of the night, so many ingrained habits took place automatically. Telling my DHV stories, teasing (push-pull), kino. There’s no need to think about it. It’s ingrained. I walk with swagger, even on the days when I’m feeling depressed as shit, because I taught myself to walk that way over a period of many months, and now I don’t have to think about it; I just do. The only reason I know this is because people people actually comment to me about it. "I know that walk from a mile away," says my buddy C. I’m more confident and positive now than ever because I’ve made habits of those ways of thinking. And they have taken a LONG ass time to settle in. But they have settled in.
3) Not going to really go into true confidence vs. false confidence. (Maybe in another post.) But having true confidence is what gives me the freedom to be vulnerable. To show interest in someone without worrying about ‘calibrating’ with a ‘neg.’ To not hide my intentions. To be open and not worry so much about status. It’s very liberating.
The J.S. Mill quote, I found in a book about game theory, something I’m getting into lately. Another really cool thing that I found in the same book was: Why humans tease each other and how it builds comfort. Total light bulb moment. I’ll write about that one in the next post.
So after typing up this “field report,” why post it? I still journal about the girls I meet, among other things. But I hardly post them for others to read. Why this one now? Maybe it’ll spark a light bulb moment for someone else. Maybe someone else is wondering how to get out of the game and still have success and self-improvement. Maybe I want to exemplify that, despite all the good things I’ve learned from pickup, you don’t have to be a pickup artist to have a great life or to get great women. Now, “I’m just a guy with some skills.”
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Live Your Truth.
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CHAT