Futuristic Words

I will be giving the talk at Columbia today. I’ve spent the last week tearing apart dating science ideas for the sake of the wider audience of a business school crowd, a group different from a normal Love Systems class because a.) they probably don’t have sex/romance as an ulterior motive and b.) the class has women in it. The talk is going to get recorded, so hopefully I’ll be able to post the audio here.

Also, I am definitely going to teach Breakthrough Comfort in Sydney and very likely in Montreal. If you are interested in signing up for the next phase of building your relationships with women– the part where you actually find a girl you really like and make CERTAIN she responds in kind– keep an eye on the Love Systems homepage and make sure to join me. I promise not only your money’s worth but an asbolutely blown mind.

Hey guys. Some quick updates:

1.) I might be giving a lecture at Columbia this Friday. If you happen to be in the NYC area, let me know, and I’ll get you the details. This seminar is about applying seductive principles to business strategies, so if you want more male-female stuff, this is not going to be your bag. If you want to see how to work a trade show or make a solid first impression on a potential customer/client, this could be right up your alley.

2.) I’ll be in Sydney 3-5 July teaching a bootcamp with Big Business and Sheriff. To say I’m excited would be a massive understatement. I’m going to try to attach a day of Breakthrough Comfort to 6 July if there’s enough interest. Call the office.

3.) I’ll be in Montreal 10-12 July teaching a bootcamp at the Montreal Jazz Festival with Cajun and Tenmagnet. The food is amazing, the women are eye-poppingly beautiful, and the entire evening workshop component will take place in a relaxed outdoor setting with great music. Sign up now!

One of the great misfortunes of the SUISC’s earliest dogmas is the tendency to revel in the power of hard teasing, cocky and funny comments, indifference, and the effect these behaviors have on women. I was talking about Mystery with a woman last night, and she broke his system down as, “I’m going to punch you in the face! Now give me a hug!”

She was being funny, but if you watch videos of so-called gurus in action, the level of teasing can be jaw-dropping for the uninitiated. The catch is that the unitiated are, by definition, our marketing demographic, the people we want in the seats at our comprehensive boot camps and the people we want reading Magic Bullets. The average seeker who comes to Love Systems or one of our competitors knows a.) he would like to be better with women, b.) douche bags somehow seem to prosper with the women our seeker desires, c.) he would like to get douche bag results without necessarily becoming a douche bag, but d.) seriously, he knows the creases in his right hand and has named them like the valleys and craters on the moon, and he would really like to start seeing a concrete, measurable change in his love/sex life instead of whatever he’s getting. He looks into the available materials, maybe watches some videos on YouTube, maybe sees Cajun using the Retard Opener on his episode of Keys to the VIP,  and he thinks the key missing from his sex life is that he’s not being enough of a jerk.

Out come the insults. A fellow student of the game came out with our group last night and stayed well past his welcome. He had peripheral knowledge of the material, but he had only skimmed the surface, not plumbed the depths of the universe of material available for the real life lessons offered up by dating science. He would periodically make snarky, rude, or borderline mysogynistic comments and while no one outright told him to leave, he eventually found himself sidelined in all conversations and devoid of eye contact. Just being a prick isn’t quite the answer.

“Be the asshole girls love!” is a common theme of the e-books and seminars offered up for consumption by the desperate. Yes, by all means, I am sure we are helping women with our presence by making sure there are more assholes in the world; surely, we will all aided by that endeavor. I know when I go out in New York City I often think, “Wow, there really aren’t enough pretentious assholes, aggressive assholes, and stupid assholes here. Someone should fix that.”

Yet there is a lesson in how their confidence manifests in a way that girls find attractive. How to cultivate the confident part of yourself to make women want to get closer to you is a post for another time. For now, I wanted to talk to you about the part where you don’t try to get her to like you but instead show her how much you like her.

So let’s talk about qualification.

If you’ve taken a boot camp where I was present, you’ve heard me rant about qualification, one of the Oh-Shit buttons I tell men to press when they are uncertain what to do next (the other one being “movement”, which I broadly define and trying anything physical). Quickly, qualification is when you elicit information from a girl in order to praise her, generally for something other than her looks. That last bit is not set in stone, though, since sexuality and appearance are valid subjects, albeit not all the time and not immediately.

The structure is fantastically simple, yet eludes many. From Magic Bullets:

1. Qualifier – You solicit the information. Often, this will be in the form of a question, but it’s usually a better idea to fold the question into a statement. This is less true of harder qualifiers– see below.

“Holy shit, I just saw the Hangover, and I my stomach still hurts. It’s either that or my tapeworm. Have you seen it?”

“No, but all my friends want to, I’ve been super-busy lately.”

“I was wondering why you had that ‘I don’t know how to have fun’ look on your face. Wait, you do like movies, right?”

2. Her response – What she says, if anything. The harder the qualifier used on the dumber the girl, the more likely you are going to get consternated looks or responses like, “Wow, that is a good question… you’re putting me on the spot. I don’t know!” As long as she doesn’t blow off the question, this counts as a response, at least from a tactical standpoint. Any answer is investment. If her answer if insufficient, that’s for you to decide, but if you’re a real man, you hold her accountable for it.

“Who doesn’t?”

“Girls I don’t like.”

“My one big regret in life is that Kurosawa cannot be one of my babies’ daddies.”

3. Explore the topic – A lot of guys skip this part, i.e. making normal conversation about something you were interested enough to ask the question in the first place. If this step doesn’t make sense to you, you might be socially awkward.

“If you can name a Kurosawa movie besides Seven Samurai, we can be BFFs.”

“What if I can name two?”

“BFFEFLs.” (pronounced “biffles”)

“What does that mean?”

“Best friends for ever for life.”

“Ran and Rashomon.”

4. Compliment - The fun part. It should be commensurate with the intensity of the question asked UNLESS her answer to a low-difficulty question really blew you away. If she is saving the world or putting tiger sharks in chokeholds, being blown away by her occupation, i.e a medium level qualifying question, is normal. Those last two sentences are not tactically sound. Get to a point where you don’t care, but if a girl tells you she’s raising hundreds of millions of dollars to save starving kids in Africa or she just got back from climbing Mount Everest, I feel like it’s only appropriate to react vehemently. You can go overboard, though, which is where the next step comes in.

“Fucking rad.”

“What?”

“What back! How often do YOU get to have Kurosawa conversations within ten minutes of meeting someone in a bar?”

“Rarely.”

“See? We’re fucking rad.”

“Yeah we are.”

5. Pull back (optional) – This step is my bread and butter because I like giving intense compliments because I’m an intense guy. Compliments are like filling a balloon. If you don’t let some of the air out or pace yourself, the balloon might pop. No need to invent the wheel here; I pull back with stuff straight out of Magic Bullets:

* Too bad you come to [wherever you both are].
* Too bad about our age difference [if we’re about the same age].
* Too bad you are [astrological sign].
* Too bad I don’t like you [smiling and playful tonality are especially important here].

6. New topic - There is not much to this part. Part of learning how to improve your social skills is learning how to stack forward to new conversation topics without worrying about logical connections and maintaining an emotionally dynamic flow to the discussion.

Obviously, not all qualifying questions are created equal. Some are easy and some are hard. In general, the easy ones mandate obvious “yes/no” answers, “Are you fun/adventurous/a good friend?” and medium questions ask for more specific information, “Can you cook?” and every question in the Normal Guy Routine. Hard questions are the meat of qualification because they are build/signify rapport and because they tell you more about the girl as an actual person. Hard qualification questions demand insight/instrospection/intelligence, and a girl simply will not answer hard qualifying questions without a certain degree of comfort and relatively high degree of attraction.* In general, I think you should concoct your own hard qualifiers because these are the questions that will result in the most meaningful answers and most sincere compliments. Consider what answers would make you happiest from a girl’s mouth (besides, “Actually, I don’t have a gag reflex.”), and go from there. Stock bits include:

“If you could be anything in the world with no chance of failure, what would you be? Don’t say princess.”

“If everyone in here looked exactly like you, how would you stand out?”

“You’re a beautiful woman but this is New York/LA/Miami/Chicago and beauty is common here, to say nothing of its ultimate meaninglessness. I’ve dated some gorgeous women, and the only thing that really matters is energy, personality, and outlook. So far you’ve got two out of three. I guess what I’m trying to ask you is what you have going for you more than your looks.”

Again: those are stock. Come up with your own STANDARDS TO WHICH YOU CAN HOLD THE WOMEN IN YOUR LIFE, and use  those as points of qualification as soon as you possibly can.

[EXERCISE: Imagine your ideal woman. I know she's beautiful. This isn't about her looks, but it will probably help if you imagine what she looks like, down to the pedicure. Does she dye her hair? Does she have fake boobs? Does she wear bright red lipstick or lip gloss? Does she always show cleavage, or does she manage to pull of sexiness and class? Does she belch around her friends and family? Is she comfortable pooping/changing tampons in front of you? Is she comfortable putting on makeup in front of you? Does she want you to be around during any of those moments? What does she do? How hard does she work? Do you care if she's tidy? Do you care if she's a slob? Does she like video games or movies or reading or sports or outdoor activities or fighting or sailing? What does she do for fun? Does she like to sit and watch DVDs on the weekend, or does she have so much energy she can only do that about once a month, if ever? How often does she need you to compliment her? How does she react to your compliments? Does she compliment you? Does she cook? Does she have time to see you more than once a week or more than once a day? Does she like to fuck outside? Can she only have an orgasm when her face is shoved in a bowl of dog food? How many men has she been with? How old is she? What race? Does she like or sometimes prefer other women? What does she do when you're sick? How does she treat other men she's attracted to when she's in your presence?

When we ask these questions in boot camps, a lot of guys are so set on impoving their sex lives that they neglect the power of our hammering on about having standards. Don't do that.]

A final note about tactical structure: hard qualifying questions should never, ever, ever be asked around her friends. They are for isolation. Yes, I’m sure someone is going to write me and tell me about the time he qualified in front of her three friends, and they all went home and had an orgy. Exceptions abound. STFU.

After he has internalized the concepts behind qualification, our lothario can ideally enter a new conversation with a new girl with his perceived value at such a high level that he can just tell a girl how nifty she is and be done with it, but that’s not realistic for everyone. Unless you are Someone in her eyes, you’re going to have to generate attraction before you attempt to solicit any information beyond her eye color. A compliment is only as good as its source, and if the girl you’re talking to isn’t attracted she’s going to react mildly at best (“Thank you.”) or coldly at worse (e.g. with an eye roll). This is where qualification comes into play as an Oh-Shit button.

A common psychological trait of Love Systems students and nearly anyone actively studying dating science** is the inability to figure out when girls actually like them. Often during evening workshops students will come to instructors and recount tales in which girls send blaring, screaming signals of interest and students, so mired in their belief that girls don’t like them, have left the girls high and dry, assuming disinterest (and sometimes sending the girls home with a feeling of having been rejected, ironically!). This is why qualification is a magical tool in your conversational arsenal.

If a girl is disinterested, she simply won’t answer questions that make her qualify herself to you. She might answer, yes, she’s fun, and she might tell you where she’s from or what she does, but this stranger you just met isn’t going to comfortably answer, “If you could have a relationship with the best sex you’ve ever had in your entire life or a perfect, Notebook-style romantic love where the sex was kind of ‘blegh’, which would you choose?” or “If you could be anything in the world– anything– with no chance of failure, what would you choose?” if everything up to the point of your asking that question didn’t interest her. As such, qualification is magical because it lets the otherwise confused man to assess exactly where he is in the interaction quickly. A while back, Braddock noticed that I tend to qualify very, very early when I start talking to a girl, i.e. often in the first fifteen seconds. I start small, but I’m reading everything when I ask, “What’s your dream?” or “What’s special about [girl's name]?” And now you know why.

Sinn used to note that I would stay in a set WELL after I clearly didn’t have attraction. Sometimes they would turn around, sometimes not. But I generally acknowledged a failure state as a chance to try ANYTHING (or at least make my friends laugh while they look on). Now, though, I am confident enough in my attractiveness and appeal that I don’t tend to waste time with girls who don’t respond well right off the bat, and I test my appeal in their eyes as quickly as I can.

Note this is NOT advice I would give to guys taking a workshop or getting individualized training with me. It’s just too easy to blow a girl off because you can’t handle the social pressure. I’m not concerned about my ability to deal with social pressure, but I am concerned about wasting my precious minutes on this earth with one of the myriad pretty things who have never bothered to develop personalities.

*– Older models separated qualification and comfort/rapport. While it probably helps to stratify them for conceptual reasons, they are deeply interwoven in actual interactions. Revealing more information about yourself both reveals and builds trust. Later stage qualification doesn’t LEAD to comfort, it is a part of comfort.

**– I believe this phenomenon extends to the greater population and results in conversations about whether this or that action or conversational point revealed that this or that guy or girl liked the speaker, but I don’t want to presume so much. That said, yeah, I think a lot of guys and girls have trouble telling when someone is actually interested because what might be a blaring signal to one person is impossible subtle or ambiguous to another and vice versa.

Seriously, whatever it is, you can do it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Buchinger

Our workshop took us to a rooftop bar. The weather in New York threatened rain all day, so the venue had wisely erected giant umbrellas. Droplets teased us like air conditioner condensation from Heaven. A few of the students wanted to see me approach and open because while they had witnessed me wading through the Emotional Progression Model in a few interactions they hadn’t seen me work from a standing start. I looked around and walked toward the prettiest girl I could see outside the umbrellas, i.e. where the students could get a good view. She was wearing a tight white dress and hoop earrings. Her friends were a tiny girl in a red dress and a large man with a military moustache and a designer shirt.

“Hey, trouble,” I said…

…The students watched as I asked for her name and spun her and asked the normal questions but in statement form. “You look like you’re from out west. Not the Midwest, but more like Idaho or Montana. You have a kind way, but you seem hard.” I was wrong– she was from Long Island– but that didn’t matter.* We were cuddling in short order before her friend swooped in.

“She’s mine!” said the little girl draped in red.

“Suit yourself,” I said. “I’ve been telling her to get away from me.”

At this point Big Business tried to intercept. My girl in white was enthralled with me despite the interruption.**  I looked to the friends to make sure everything was okay. Her tall man-friend looked on with what I thought was approval. “You better take her number, dude. It looks like she really likes you!”

We chatted more. An attractive couple I had chatted with earlier in the night walked by and, as I asked them to do if they saw me with a cute girl, started cooing and praising me, demanding this girl see my stand-up comedy show.

Soon we were kissing in the rain. Hands, hair, and coy smiles.

“Okay,” I said. “Your friends are vanishing, and my friends are about to pull me away. I better do what your friend said. But we can’t ever talk to each other because it could be the end of the world. You really should stay awa from me.” She gave me her number, and I purposely made a mistake, which she corrected.

She walked back to her friends with my hand in hers. I still had my phone out and said, “I got it,” while making eye contact with her male friend, my co-conspirator.

“What?” he said, his eyes about sixteen shades angrier than I was expecting.

“I got her number like you told me to, killer,” I said. The “r” had not left my mouth before he had knocked my (9$!) drink out of my hand. My eyes widened, and I took a step back, dropping my copy of Blood Meridian and holding my hands up, never breaking eye contact. He’d been drinking, and he wasn’t puffing up or shouting. He just stared and sneered, snapping at his two friends.

The girl in red came quickly to me. “They’re in a relationship,” she said and went back to calm the guy down.

“Dude, I’m sorry,” I said, my hands still up.

“Fuck you,” he said.

Two other instructors dashed forward and tried to smooth things over. Calabrese repeated a few times, “Everything’s cool, man. Just walk away,” and the three eventually left, although the guy was still steaming and muttering bitterness to the girl in white.

Even in the immediate aftermath, I didn’t hold any malice toward the guy. How could I when he gave me my new favorite story? If anything, I empathized with this man with the unfortunate facial hair. While I’ve never been in that exact situation, I was in a relationship for a long time where the girl flaunted her sexual power in extremely painful ways. Like this guy, I had anger toward my girlfriend, but my real rage was directed to the guys who were putting their hands and cocks in and on My Girl. With her I had fitful conversations where I begged her to please, if she could maybe stop screwing or blowing anyone who showed her he bought condoms, that would be super. That frustration was a different experience from the need to wipe the slate clean, to abolish with blood her pristine(?) essence from the filthy hands of those thuggish interlopers who had the audacity to seduce her.

I hope this was a catalyst, that he’s telling his friends about tonight a year from now.  I hope this is the light from the sky where he realizes that she doesn’t really respect him, and he owes himself better than to invest energy and emotion in a girlfriend willing and eager to exhibit that sort of behavior.

That’s unlikely, though.

Tonight was probably just another tear in his tattered self-worth, yet another reminder that he is less than they both wish he was. For the rest of the night, I started my conversations by asking who was more fucked up in that situation. Girls unanimously said the girl was vastly more wrong, and guys were usually silent if they weren’t fist-pounding me. But I’m not so sure. Yes, she was wrong in that moment, but that moment isn’t their story. The really egregious business doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens during backed up traffic or missed appointments or flirting with friends or impatience with a bartender or waiter. The seeds of contemptuous behavior are strewn through every day, every interaction. All the worst crimes of a relationship are symptomatic of something else, unmet needs deeper in the core.

Good luck, sir, wherever you are, and peace be unto you. I appreciate that you didn’t take a shot at me… but I would have understood.

[UPDATE: Big Business feels it's appropriate to add that the girl in red and the guy were being, um, unpleasant. And they were. They were EXTREMELY antagonistic and saying ugly things to him and me, although I didn't hear it. Really, these just weren't the most charming people at the bar that night, the girl's tight white dress aside. Still, I think the guy's hostility is still a reflection of his overall insecurity and weakness, reflected yet again in his eagerness to turn his frustration into violence. Despite his douchery, I am compelled toward empathy because no one-- and I mean no one-- should have to watch his girlfriend make out with another guy right before his eyes.]

*– The key is to avoid the Routine Everyone Else Uses, and get the boring stuff answered in an interesting way. There are a whole slew of examples for this in the LS Routines Manual, by the way. My favorite, and the one I contributed to the LSRM, is to wildly and utterly confuse races, i.e. say a girl with an obvious African accent is from Korean, &c.

**– It is boring to recap. I was just spewing obvious sexual intent and pushing her away when the moment was right.

I.

Since I returned to work as a dating coach, I’ve been receiving a steady stream of compliments on my writing. I never know how to take the nice things people say in e-mails and IMs and private messages and comments. On calmer nights I like to pour all your praise in a bath tub and lather it all over me while I act out my favorite Herbal Essences commercials, but most nights I find myself staring at the keyboard, all your nice things forgotten, and I look at my verbal spewings, and I see nonsense and rubbish when held under the light of Virgil, Nabokov, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, William Stafford, Faulkner, Turgenev, Orwell, Milton, Eliot, Rimbaud, and Oh-God-The-List-Just-Keeps-Going! See, Raskolnikov ponders the teleological suspension of the ethical with blood on his hands, while I try to tell girls about my huge cock without soiling myself laughing. There is no contest, in my mind. (And that’s omitting entirely the humility stand-up comedy teaches me night after night. No, you should never perform before or after Jim Gaffigan.) Of course, the compliments are really a nice way of saying it’s pleasant to read something written by a dating coach who can use the phrase “teleological suspension of the ethical” in a sentence without hurting himself. I am glad to be the axis point around which horny sesquepadalians the world over unite.

All that quibbling is to say what you already know: “good writing” is a relative term. As much as I shift and fidget at the notion, the truth is that whatever moves you or stimulates your brain is “good writing”. Unless you are moved and stimulated by Stephanie Meyer in which case, um, you should be sterilized. Seriously. I don’t want my kids playing with your kids and getting stupid germs all over them. Very few writers can be explicitly denounced as bad because art is relative, but I don’t think it’s fair to words and letters to apply that sort of literary pluralism to Stephanie Meyer. As near as I can tell, she’s illiterate, and I can only pray her readers will use their experiences with Edward and Bella as springboards to other, better work such as ingredient lists and technical manuals. Stephanier Meyer might be one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse: “Dear America, this is how stupid you are now!” I can say this to you, dear readers, because if you’re one of the people who likes my way with words, you understand. And it’s to you people I want to recommend David Foster Wallace.

I’d heard of him before his suicide on 12 September 2008, but I never bothered to read his words until I read a hundred or so effusive obituaries. It turns out the body of work he left behind is nothing short of thrilling. Those who are close to me have long since tired of my apostolic approach to his work, but he really is that good. I’ve managed to consume (if not digest) his corpus, with the notable exception of Everything. In between DFW sprees, I’ve perused some history books and light fantasy, and even when I adore the book I just finished, I come back to DFW and am leveled by the beauty of his words and the power of his mind. While I love hearing encouragement for my prose here, I can only blush and kick my feet in the dirt when I think about what good writing really is, when I compare my words and work, the clarity or lack thereof with which I relate ideas and emotions, to David Foster Wallace. His work is a luminous presence in the landscape of the English language, and we all lost something wonderful when he left us.

So let’s get started. His oeuvre (linked here) isn’t terribly large, but it is dense.

First read his wonderful address to Kenyon College in 2005. For a while I was reading it every day, but now I read it once a week or more. (It has since been collected and published as This is Water. That link is a way to light money on fire. Read the free version outside these parenthetical comments.)

Next, I would peruse his tennis article for the New York Times, “Roger Federer as  Religious Experience” Note that I don’t follow professional sports and couldn’t care less about tennis. Read the article anyway.

After that, both the eponymous articles from his non-fiction collections are excellent reads: “Consider the Lobster” (book) and “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again“. (book)

Finally, I have a special place in my heart for his excellent article, “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage“, which details the way that Bryan Garner’s Oxford Dictionary of American Usage cuts through the middle of the “ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness” running along the “seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography.” If you don’t know where you stand on prescriptivism versus descriptivism or see semicolons dangling in the air between loosely connected independent clauses when you’re talking, that article might be annoying to you, but if you are in any way a language nerd, you need to click that link RIGHT NOW– or purchase Consider The Lobster, where it has been anthologized.

If you muddle through his work and want to know more about the man, R0lling Stone published a lovely, harrowing tribute the month after he took his life. There’s another great piece in Rolling Stone where David Lipsky, the author ot the tribute piece, discusses what the man was like. Also, The New Yorker published a great piece about his struggle to surpass Infinite Jest. All are great reads but even moreso if you’ve already fallen in love with the man’s writing.

II.

If a girl mentioned David Foster Wallace before I did– it hasn’t happened yet– I would pretty much fall for her on the spot. (That actually happened with a recent new friend. We were talking about books, and he mentioned DFW before I did. Then he played a couple of my favorite Metallica songs note for note. Instant kinship!) Wallace’s command of the language is not merely good writing but the closest thing I’ve seen to textual wizardry. He somehow manages to out-Proust Proust– the only author who would applaud DFW for his succinctness– when he describes the complex chronology and density of human thought in “Good Old Neon”. His ruminations on the role aging and physical decline play in our appreciation of the ones we love is nothing short of haunting in “Oblivion”. (both collected in Oblivion) Men, try not to wince at your own reflection when reading any of the stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. As for Wallace’s magnum opus, the book to which his name is welded forever, Infinite Jest, I don’t know how prepared I am to discuss it at any length or depth. It is alternately scathing, hilarious, impenetrable, tragic, and always  always beautifully written. While it probably could have been cut in half and still been as brilliant, I think I’ll save that judgment for a second read-through.

“Dear Future, why are you talking about this on your Love Systems blog? Isn’t this supposed to be a space for dating advice?”

Yep. If you’ve made it this far, let’s talk about DFW’s rampant psychosexual issues. They’re manifest in his personal life (his string of girlfriends and near-fiancees throughout his thirties), but they absolutely flood his writings. His perspective on the American/Western fascination with entertainment and novelty and our inability to cope with boredom is the brutal pedaltone under “Oblivion” and “Big Red One” and a bunch of other articles, as well as one of the main themes of Infinite Jest.  I can only paraphrase his thoughts on real love because after searching through SFTINDA and CtL, I couldn’t find one of my favorite quotes. Essentially he remarks that love of passion, love in the instant, is a feeble thing compared to the love you see in old couples’ eyes, a love that is stronger, maybe the strongest thing humans know, BECAUSE it is built on the mortar of self-sacrifice, of knowing what would be be the best for the “I” but eschewing that for the success of the “we”, of loving something else more than the self. No, that’s not fun talk sitting here in the shadow of the SUISC, but it’s not crazy to wonder how we humans fit together in love and lust, how some elements of dating science bring us closer to our true selves and some of the more hysterical, misogynistic dogma isolates us from our fellow humans.

The remnants of DFW’s sexual anxiety are easy to find, but I think the most interesting bits are in Infinite Jest, his sprawling critique of America’s entertainment culture and our culturally induced addiction cycles.

[The below needs a preamble. I'm about to start going on about IJ, but you need to understand it's a 1,047 page book with hundreds of end notes, and it's structured unlike any other novel you're likely to read-- the end notes are something like commercial breaks-- and there are a bunch of unreliable narrators. The book ends on a "Whu...?" note, and there are a gazillion loose ends and ambiguously rendered ideas. All this is to say that I may have missed a passage that contradicts what I'm writing below, but I'm giving it my best shot. I'm aware of how complicated all this is, and I hope you'll stay with me for the end of the ride.]

One of the principles, Joelle Van Dyne, is a beautiful redhead one of the other principles nicknames the Prettiest Girl of All Time, or P.G.O.A.T. She is so astonishingly beautiful that she cannot expect rational behavior from anyone she knows, least of all her own father. In her own words:

I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind. Once they’ve seen me they can’t think of anything else and don’t want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be all right. Everything. Like I’m the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.

The only people who treat her like a human being are super-lothario-ultra-”natural”-pimptastic womanizer Orin (the progenitor of the P.G.O.A.T. moniker) and Orin’s father James Incandenza, who eventually casts her in Infinite Jest, a piece of video so compelling it kills the viewer. When the reader meets Joelle, she has lost her looks (probably… maybe… She wears a veil at all times… It’s one of those ambiguities I mentioned above) and she has receded into an awful cocaine addiction. The reasons for her swan dive into addiction and misery are not totally clear, but it’s almost certainly not because she has lost her physical beauty. Instead, it seems to be because she has lost the love of the one person treated her like a person, Orin, and the only other person who could act rationally around her– indeed, who respected her brain and talent more than her looks– Orin’s father James, has killed himself. This isn’t the last time Wallace would visit the subject of age’s toll on the body and subsequently on the mind. He is particularly sensitive to the plight of the precarious value of youthful feminine beauty and its ability to withstand the inevitable ravages of time. Orin left her when her looks were destroyed (or, if they weren’t destroyed, he left because of her peculiar relationship to Orin’s dad, and despite her enormous capabilities and intellect, she was left adrift.

The role of Joelle’s feminine beauty emphasizes DFW’s tendency to lug his lust like a burden. For him, the relationship between men’s desire and women’s beauty is a dangerous and sad thing, and following through with it is the slipperiest of slopes. Here is how DFW captures the inner lashings of the chronic seducer, Orin:

“They have shifted into a sexual mode. Her lids flutter; his close. There’s a concentrated tactile languor. She is left-handed. It is not about consolation. They start the thing with each other’s buttons. It is not about conquest or forced capture. It is not about glands or instincts or the split second shiver and clench of leaving yourself; nor about love or about whose love you deep-down desire, by whom you feel betrayed. Not and never love, which kills what needs it. It feels to the punter rather to be about hope, an immense, wide-as-the-sky hope of finding a something the same that will propitiate hope, somehow, pay its tribute, the need to be assured that for a moment he has her, now has won her as if from someone or something else, something other than he, but that he has her and is what she sees and all she sees, that it is not conquest but surrender that he is both offense and defense and she neither, nothing but this one second’s love of her, of-her, spinning as it arcs his way, not his but her love, that he has it, this love (his shirt off now, in the mirror), that for one second she loves him too much to stand it, that she must (she feels) have him, must take him inside or else dissolve into worse than nothing; that all else is gone: that her sense of humor is gone, her petty griefs, triumphs, memories, hands, career, betrayals, the deaths of pets-that there is inside her now a vividness vacuumed of all but his name: O., O. That he is The One.

(This is why, maybe, one Subject is never enough, why hands after hand must descend to pull him back from the endless fall. For were there for him just one, now, special and only, the One would be not he or she but what was between them, the obliterating trinity of You and I into We. Orin felt that once and has never recovered and will never again.)

And about contempt, it is a kind of hatred, too, along with the hope and need. Because he needs them, needs her, because he needs her he fears her and so hates her a little, hates all of them, a hatred that comes disguised as a contempt he disguises in the tender attention with which he does the thing with her buttons, touches the blouse as if it too were a part of her, and him. As if it could feel. They have stripped each other neatly. Her mouth is glued to his mouth; she is his breath, his eyes shut against the sight of hers.)”

Here’s the rub: that is pretty much every guy in a frivolous situation, to include DFW.  From “The Lost Years and Last Days of Davis Foster Wallace”:

It had been difficult, during the summer, to watch his sister get married. “I’m almost 35. I would like to get married and have kids. I haven’t even started to work that shit out yet. I’ve come close a few times, but I tend to be interested in women that I turn out to not get along very well with. I have friends who say this is something that would be worth looking into with someone that you pay.”

Wallace was always dating somebody. “There were a lot of relationships,” Amy says. He dated in his imaginative life too: When I visited him, one wall was taped with a giant Alanis Morissette poster. “The Alanis Morissette obsession followed the Melanie Griffith obsession — a six-year obsession,” he said. “It was preceded by something that I will tell you I got teased a lot for, which was a terrible Margaret Thatcher obsession. All through college: posters of Margaret Thatcher, and ruminations on Margaret Thatcher. Having her really enjoy something I said, leaning forward and covering my hand with hers.”

He tended to date high-strung women — another symptom of his shyness. “Say what you want about them, psychotics tend to make the first move.” Owning dogs was less complicated: “You don’t get the feeling you’re hurting their feelings all the time.”

His romantic anxieties were full-spectrum, every bit of the mechanics individually examined. He told me a joke:

What does a writer say after sex?

Was it as good for me as it was for you?

“There is, in writing, a certain blend of sincerity and manipulation, of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be,” he said. “It’s a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. My guess is that writers probably make fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely.”

One night Wallace met the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose depression memoir, Prozac Nation, had recently been published. She thought he looked scruffy — jeans and the bandanna — and very smart. Another night, Wallace walked her home from a restaurant, sat with her in her lobby, spent some time trying to talk his way upstairs. It charmed Wurtzel: “You know, he might have had this enormous brain, but at the end of the day, he still was a guy.”

For all the bluster and bravado of the SUISC, the whole reason for its being is that men need validation, need approval. The strongest can provide it for themselves most of the time– we try to teach you to do that as much as possible– and, in those moments when you MUST react to your emotions, there is much to recommend being choosy when selecting those on whom your sense of validation is going to depend– the hollowness of truly casual sex is an awesome chasm in the pit your spirit, the endless fall. It is nonetheless a principle feature of the male psyche to crave approval. The more primal the activity, the more the male self tends to need validation for it, which, I think, explains the female propensity to fake orgasms. (Or so I’ve heard; I have no idea what a faked orgasm actually looks like because I’m hung like Shane Diesel’s and Mr. Ed’s love child.  Also, this origin of faked orgasms is not my idea; I stole it from Luane Brizendine in The Female Brain.)

Obviously, this relationship to validation is not an ideal state, but which of us is ever ideal? Yes, yes, we teachers and “gurus” design to help you be your best self, but part of being that best self is accepting that even at your best you have limitations. Perspective and distance can come only, it seems, with a healthy dose of heartache and disappointment, enough to know that any one such thing will rarely if ever be the death stroke unless an individual allows it: wisdom vs. knowledge. DFW assumes a mantle of scorn when describing Orin and his exploits, but the same exploits are regarded as steps on the road to humanity by writers like John Updike (whom DFW regards contemptuously and calls an “asshole”). Moreover, it seems more like a dialog he is having with himself, an angry self-upbraiding from someone who couldn’t feed his own validation engine and wasn’t satisfied when others tried, a textbook example of asking his readers to do what he says but not what he does. I don’t regard that as a bad thing, by the way. I think it’s important to note, though, and to attempt to understand how a genius with sexual troubles dogging his psyche dialogs with himself.

How do you maintain faith that you haven’t made a bad call when all the world seems excited to sell you myriad better options than the one you chose? In an internet-MTV-fast-food-birth-control-no-fault-divorce world, how do we define commitment? How does a modern human, male or female, harvest a love greater than the self? Conversely, how do we love ourselves enough to be comfortable giving our love away? How do we love freely, giving ever-outward, not managing the reactions of others for greatest effect?

I don’t know.

I can and do teach men how to get laid. I feel like it’s part of my job description at the very least. A customer comes to me looking for advice about his sex life, most of the time. But I don’t know how far apart sex and lust are from the deeper, richer corners of the human heart. I hope my work with Love Systems grants me the opportunity to give back, to bestow on other men the ability to connect with the people around them, especially those people whose tenderness and sensibility they most desire, whose touches inspire the brightest flames of lust and (this is my hope, if not my responsibility) love. I hope my work helps people achieve the most pristine states of being imaginable, to perhaps even defy the limits of their own imaginations. I hope I can help men ask hard questions and demand the best of themselves and from those they allow entrance into their lives. Because even though every man (I believe) has a jackrabbit lurking somewhere inside, what we really want is to touch another person’s soul, to be strong enough that we can be vulnerable enough to forge a real bond. That does not and should not be separate from our lust, and it doesn’t make us sinners for seeing smooth, taut skin and yearning to smell and taste and feel it. Note that not everyone is strong enough to forge a real bond. Not everyone has the balls to hold both himself and his partner accountable. As we instructors push people into potentially scary interactions with girls and dare them to fail, so do I dare anyone to drop through the sky and hurtle toward the earth without a net, fumbling with an untested ‘chute. I dare anyone learning to enhance his interactions with the fairer sex to seize the moment love offers itself as a chance to be emotionally alert without being needy. I dare you to risk the ugliness of love (those people with whom you form the deepest bonds can cause the deepest hurt) and to eventually learn to do so kindly yet strongly.

You don’t have to, obviously. I’ll still teach you; I understand the argument for cloistering the sense and securing the heart. Even now I am licking my wounds from when a star fell from my sky and went supernova while I held her to my chest. If you don’t expose yourself to the wiles and machinations of the rest of the world, although you might probably be happier when the real horror comes knocking at your door, the happiness is a lie; it is merely comfort, and you will be smiling and unprepared when the monsters gut you on your threshold. I dare you to love because the isolation of the spirit does not accurately reflect the world we live in. Whether you believe in your own reflection or the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, you are not alone in this. You are a part of a family, a town, a city, a country, a species, a planet, a galaxy, and a universe. There IS something bigger than you, bigger than me, and bigger than the entire universe of swirling thoughts and ideas, bigger than the entire library of Karl Popper’s third world can encompass. Fundamentally, this is why I liberally take joy from what we teach at Love Systems. Flawed though the path might often be, we are helping men with differing degrees of social maladroitness– and the courage to recognize it!– realize their ability to connect with others, making the species stronger– stronger in mind, body, and soul– by making some of its mightiest misbegotten better at being themselves.

Rest in peace, David. Thank you for sharing your gift.

One of the most frustrating things teachers of dating science  have to deal with is approach anxiety, both their own and their students’. Don’t mistake this frustration for a lack of commitment or volition. If someone comes to me to fix their problems approaching girls, that is a wonderful thing. At least he’s being proactive about his situation and not resigning himself to pining for women’s desire in the corner of life’s bar, shielding himself with a beer or a pile of excuses. But it makes me sad when someone pays me a lot of money to shove my hand between his shoulder blades. It’s beneath both of us.

Approach anxiety is the most pervasive sticking point amongst the legion of men I’ve encountered since I first started studying romantic/sexual social dynamics. From instructors who have been teaching others how to attract girls for years to my meeker friends who would just as soon retreat to a plastic guitar or a d20 and maybe (maybe) meet a “bbw” off the internet, approach anxiety is a phenomenon understood across eras, languages, and cultures. I don’t know if everyone’s chest tightens when they have to make the transition from, “Hey, that girl is cute!” to “I should go talk to that cute girl!” but I’ve seen breath shorten in the mouths of the most seasoned lotharios I know when they see a potential lover, whether the man in question has been successful with women his entire life or he learned how to talk to girls on the internet. Like AIDS, approach anxiety does not discriminate.

The biggest nuisance of approach anxiety is that the real work of improving your initial relationships with women, the real work of hammering out for yourself what it means to be an attractive man, doesn’t begin until you overcome that one hurdle, this action so mythic your mind will shove a thousand reasons in the space of a synapse to help you not go through with the awful, arduous task of starting a conversation with a beautiful stranger. But once you approach you still have to be cute, interesting, dynamic, non-needy, funny, charming, and above all fun. While those things are possible under the duress of having just sluffed off a bout of approach anxiety– I’ve had to summon them professionally under the watchful, hungry eyes of students– they do not come easily. When we teach “opening” at Love Systems, we try to explain this paradox, that the opening of a conversation is simultaneously the most troublesome and difficult (because everyone gets approach anxiety) and the easiest and least important (because anything works to open and after that initial approach, you need follow-through).

In the last few months I’ve noticed a marked decrease in my own approach anxiety. I can’t claim it has disappeared, but I have done some soul-searching that has helped me suppress or eliminate the demons that rise up whenever I want to speak to a girl. Understand I’m writing about a phenomenon in myself that surprised me when I noticed it. I EXPECT to feel anxiety, so when, in recent months, it would strikes like a cobra in my guts (normal, been happening for years) and subsequently fade in seconds (not normal), I was delighted and eager to figure out how I did it. Everything I’m writing here is me trying to make sense of my recent discoveries and to share it with my readership, with former and potential students. If it doesn’t make sense or you think it sucks, by all means let me know.

What magic salve have I discovered? How did I overcome a sticking point that has plagued me since long before I knew about the SUISC? Simple:

Girls love me.

In fact, I’ll go one further and say that people, as a rule, enjoy my company when they meet me. Time and time again, this has proven to be the case. I start flirting with a girl on the PATH train or ask the girl behind the counter for her number, and it goes swimmingly, even perfectly. Yes, yes, I know what I do for a living, but the new part is my perspective, not my job. See, in the past, when I wanted to talk to a pretty girl, my brain would start listing contingencies, possible failure states, and just generally be unhelpful. Now, I retreat to the foxhole in my mind. In my mind, I  sit in my office and play with my dog while an ocean breeze wafts through my nostrils. This while my feet are moving and my mouth is opening.

Or I’ll own that moment. I’ll see her standing in front of me and feel my chest tighten, and I’ll surrender to it. I’ll play the movie in my head, except it goes very well. As my breathing halts and my chest tightens, I notice. I unwind the muscles and inhale while the pleasant movie plays in my head: now she’s laughing at my joke; now she’s playing with her hair. Other memories come into play as well. If you’ve been on a boot camp with me recently, you’ve seen my little ritual where I thrust my fists into the sky and scream, “Women love us!” Partly I’m trying to psych my guys up, partly I’m being funny, and partly I’m going through a list of successful conversations and interactions in my head:

It was a cold night, and I had to drag myself out; mostly it was an excuse to hang out with Big Business and TheDon. This beautiful girl next to me was shivering, and I offered my coat. She and her friends loved me.

I had a new video game, and I didn’t want to go to the birthday party I’d already said I would attend. I walked up the stairs with a smile and walked out the door a few hours later with the most beautiful girl in the room.

After a boot camp, a night of drinking and carousing ended at Scores. I broke all the rules and ended up dating a stripper with a pin-up body.

She was a perfect afternoon in Los Angeles whose memory I won’t spoil by recounting here. Fortune smiled brightly on me.

None of those examples is me tooting my horn; they are real, powerful memories I cycle through when I feel even the slightest twinge of fear when faced with a beautiful woman who would normally intimidate me. Like you, my brain gives me a ton of reasons why I shouldn’t approach a woman I’m attracted to. Sometimes they’re no coherent; they just fly by and form a knot in my gut. If I slow the tape down they range from, “She’s with a bunch of guys; you could get killed,” to “Who talks to strangers on the subway? She’ll think you’re a creep.” They all make sense in an unhelpful sort of way because I’m a clever boy, and clever people are masters when it comes to explaining and rationalizing their own points of view. I don’t know why my brain is wired to consider all the potential negative consequences of talking to a beautiful stranger, but at some point in the last few months I started believing my own press releases, I guess, and I was finally able to supplant that over-cautious voice in my head telling me I was destined for failure and replace it with a genuinely excitement to explore this new person, to make a stranger into a friend or lover. A large part of it is that I have started enjoying people again, maybe even loving them. The way people behaved when I was in Toronto was so different from how they behave in London, and both are wild contrasts from New York City, the greatest city in the world. Yet all people are the same in fundamental ways. Every new encounter with another human, another soul walking the earth just like you, is a chance to meet a new best friend, a chance to explore another perspective, maybe even a chance to meet the love of your life or the lust of your night.

(This article is all about frame control, by the way. Savvy readers already figured that out. If you haven’t yet, read it again.)

Big Business recently reprimanded me for cursing the fickle attentions of a girl whose attentions waned over the course of our conversation. It’s always humbling when someone quotes you back to you. “Maniac,” he said, “Right in my notebook: ‘Cunt’, ‘bitch’, ’slut,’ and ‘whore’. Get rid of them. Wipe them from your vocabulary. So how is it that you’re calling that girl a ‘bitch’?”

Right he was. As my idol, Joss Whedon, says, “Everyone has a story, everyone has a motivation, even the second thug from the left.”  Everyone has their own reasons for being how and who they are, for manifesting whatever public face they use. Beautiful women, those lucky, lucky girls, are the focus of our attentions, and they deserve special empathy because it is so often denied them. They live in a spotlight they didn’t earn; they are genetically blessed, inhabiting a fortunate phenotype, and they are under the microscope, under so much pressure from the ticking clock pulsing in their veins, a clock that will drag their breasts toward the dirt and line their eyes with crow’s feet, reminders of how they smiled too much, of how happy their beauty once made them. They are people, big festivals of flaws, and they deserve no more or less deference than anyone else. The fear hits because you are overestimating the value of their tentative, accidental gifts. Consider why we have fear. It exists to alert you to the possibility that you might, just maybe, die. Your mind sends messages to the body that this is a new situation, and you might be unprepared to deal with it. But barring the presence of bombs or bullets, most choices we make in the first world have little to do with life and death. They are choices between a flat screen and a projector, to watch American Idol or a movie or read a book. Some gurus argue that our fear is evolutionarily based; while their arguments are sound, I’m not going to let our parents or media or friends off the hook. I think the fear is societally based, an implanted fear of talking to strangers, of rocking the boat, of going against the grain and daring to fail. Learn to fail so you can learn from failure. Learn to love the opportunity to experience the cold water of another person’s raw humanity being sloshed in your face. Take joy in the explosive potential of every moment. When you see that girl, review every positive experience you’ve ever had and focus on the many ways life has been so very, very good to you.

And go talk to her.

Obviously, I can say all this because I have a list of beautiful women reacting splendidly to my approach that I can drag from the depths of my memory. It was not always that way. Try this:

Visualize what it would be like to approach that woman.

If your chest clenches or you otherwise experience approach anxiety, that’s a good thing; it means your imagination is working.
Now, imagine yourself approaching.
(Some of you might see yourself getting rejected. If that’s the case, it’s perfectly natural. Just start over.)
See yourself doing well. See her laughing at  your jokes, maybe casually touching your shoulder.
Do this over and over again until your body stops fighting you.
Indeed, if your reaction to that situation is too visceral, focus on relaxing, calming your body and slowing your heartbeat and breathing.
Then go back.
The first time you approach That Girl, you might still be nervous, but eventually you will staunch your fear response.

As I mentioned above, much of this is me running my sock. I don’t know how much of it is coherent and useful. Please leave comments, positive or negative, so I can sort through my own ideas.

Now, for the sake of completeness I have to touch on the other good advice on approaching you’re likely to find by perusing the Interwebz. I must repeat what has been posted a zillion times before, which is that your fear response is pretty much irrelevant. Everything I posted above is a nice bonus, but the REAL advice is that if what I said doesn’t work for you, you still need to put one foot in front of the other and open your mouth. You can’t count on any technique to make the fear go away. It doesn’t matter if you hate clubs or bars or if you work too much, if you are reading this, you have seen beautiful women who have passed you by. Why are you going to wait for the fear to leave when it won’t change your results? Are you really going to lose the one opportunity to talk to an amazing woman because you didn’t deal with your approach anxiety? Hell, no, you’re not.

Also, to repeat others’ advice, when approaching at night, the first three interactions don’t count. Talk to as many people as you possibly can; obviously focus on women, but don’t be shy about guys. You want to be socially lubricated, not charismatic or wonderful. After the first three groups, you will find your anxiety dramatically reduced. By the same token, you should generally be more talkative. Don’t think of cashiers as “ATMs with hands” as Sinn used to say. Chat. Add five sentences. See if you can make a stranger laugh. Talk about the weather. Don’t think so hard about why you’re saying what you’re saying so much as having an interaction with another human being. Ideally, you can actually relate to them, but it’s not necessary. Heck, an unexpected pleasant conversation goes a long way to improving your average Joe or Jill Cubicle’s day.

I’ll change this article as my thoughts become clearer. I just wanted to get it out there. I hope it helps some of you! ‘

Peace be with you

(UPDATE: Earlier this year, I did some extremely intense work with Hypnotica, Johnny Soporno, and Jamie Smart. I also recently sat in skeptical but rapt attention while listening to Devon White. One of the most annoying parts about asking hypno-NLP-spirit-chakra-woo-woo guys about inner change work is that they always talk about how they’re imprinting things that will take time to manifest or take shape, that their work will just suddenly fall into place, and you can’t rush the process. Well… that’s probably what happened with everything above. What’s that hoary expression? When the student is ready, the master will appear… or something? As I unravel my new understandings, it would be disingenuous to omit the work I did with these guys. I want to especially mention Hypnotica, who produced results that I didn’t know were possible, and he did it in about thirty minutes.  He did some very funky woo-woo stuff to me and it felt like he had literally tossed my anxiety out of my body. While the initial effect subsided in about 24 hours, the aftermath is hard for me to dispute… or prove. Steve P was there, too, but we didn’t do nearly as much spiritual stuff. We did what he’s well-known for, and you should definitely buy his product. It works.)