Futuristic Words

When I urge students not to judge I mean they need to release themselves from worry about the outcome of any given interaction. That’s easy to say from my pulpit after five years of coaching this stuff professionally, but if you’re the guy with the porn claw palsy and enough hunger for change that you’ll pay for a boot camp it can be jarring to have some chump tell you to calm down and release yourself from judgment.

The Love Systems Triad model is a glorious thing. I’ve yet to see something more useful in terms of diagramming the progress of a male/female sexual relationship. When I first found Love Systems I’d heard a lot of pick-up lines and routines, but they ricocheted uncomfortably off one another in the maelstrom of my mind. When do I stop talking about who lies more, guys or girls? At what point do I tell her why I have my nails painted black? Chris Rock told me girls like compliments. When do I do that?

Then I learned the model.

I could almost see the pieces physically fitting into place. All the lines and routines I’d ever heard suddenly had an ideal place, and through the context of the model I could self-diagnose. Guys who don’t learn Love Systems basically stumble in the dark with reltney as their primary teaching tool.* They learn how to play the game, or they confine their sexual releases to masturbation. Eventually they demonstrate their masculine value in a way that resonates with a girl at just the right time– sometimes over a period of time, as is the case with many couples– and the man gets picked, as if by lottery. Probably the most frequent desire I hear from students is that they want to stop being chosen arbitrarily, and they want to start choosing the women they actually desire.

In order to do that, the pimp-in-training needs to have a path, a discrete tool to identify why, exactly, women are not beating down his door. With Love Systems, what was once dismissed under the capricious heading of talent becomes attainable under the optimistic heading of a teachable skill.
Like any other teachable skill, learning how to date more effectively demands patience and commitment not merely to the win/loss rate but to the process by which those wins and losses are attained. Whether it’s a kata in martial arts or a scale (or chord) in music, the building blocks need to be in place before the intent behind learning those fundamentals can be meaningfully expressed. Love Systems’s naysayers like to crow how this sort of thing is what people ought to be taught from birth and if you don’t learn it you’re a weirdo or some such. I pity their pessimism.

Foregoing judgment is really about committing to the process of learning, the acquisition of a skill in the pursuit of mastery. If you let every blow-out and every cold word level your sense of well-being, you are going to plateau very quickly, often permanently. Girls will not always be nice. cf. Rule #1. Depending on where you are psychologically this can be very, very difficult. You have to divorce yourself not only from the lows, which could steer you to quit in frustration, but from the highs that breed complacency.

The hardest part of learning Love Systems is learning to take long looks in the mirror without distorting your own reflection.

That’s where the lack of judgment comes into play. Learn to look at every potential sexual interactions as an opportunity to learn. There is no failure, only feedback. The only time you fail is when you stop trying. Focus on what aspect of the model you can improve and implement small changes (baby steps, as I’ll talk about in Rule #6), and work on improving your skill at socializing, your skill with women, instead focusing on the broader, harder to gauge, less achievable goals.

Another aspect of this rule is not getting your panties in a twist over all this. If you can’t relax and let go and focus on the  process your desperation and anxiety are going to carry a palpable stink to women who regularly interact with genuinely confident men. This means don’t judge the girls for being bitches (cf. Rule #1, and every time you might have read the terrific advice, “She can’t reject you; she can only reject your approach).

This last bit is a bit hazy because there’s another side. If you are going to attach negative and positive emotions to the interaction, attribute all the positive events to yourself and how awesome you are and attribute all the negative events to her. I hate giving this advice because when I see guys follow it to the letter they eventually become people desperately in need of bullet wounds. That said, attributing all negative events to external loci of control and attributing positive events to internal loci of control is a mirror of what guys who are really good with women do. And, yes, this results in douchey behavior. To wit, I was talking with my friend Natural Adam, and I gave him the rap about how she can’t reject you, she can only reject your approach, and he listened somewhat impatiently– the majority of his attention was on a Patriots game– and I more or less parroted the first part of this post. He looked at me and said, “Yeah, or she could just be a bitch.”

It’s a parody of guys hitting on girls to say that any girl who rejects you is a bitch or a lesbian, but it’s a healthier attitude (marginally) than saying that you, the would-be player, suck at life because some girl sneered at you when you approached her.

Next entry, #5: Break Your Wrist

*– Guys whose sex and romantic lives give cause for concern. Obviously that passage holds little relevance to the lifelong lothario. Hmmm… That’s an idea for another post.