Futuristic Words

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

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 [...]

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 SUIS C? 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 c ourse 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 c an 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.)