In my twenties I decided the answer to everything was getting better at approaching women.
I was not a natural candidate. I was shy and introverted, I painted fantasy miniatures, I built model kits and I read constantly. None of that is a promising foundation for the project I set myself.
I learned the techniques anyway, and then went completely all in, which is what my brain does with anything it decides to hyperfocus on. I did it for years and I got results.
I can report on those results, because I ran the experiment properly and for long enough to get a clean answer. I was no more comfortable around women at the end of it than at the start. I had simply gotten good at a performance that let me avoid finding out.
Why can the technique work and change nothing?
Because it hits the target it aims at and the target is the wrong one.
The techniques are not fraudulent. Some of them do reliably produce the outcome they describe, which is exactly why the industry keeps going and why the men in it can point at results. I got results. That is not in dispute.
What none of it produced was ease. I was still tense in the room. I was executing something instead of talking to somebody, and the tension underneath never moved, because a performance is not the same as being comfortable and doing one well proves nothing about the other.
The pitch works because it never names the real objective. It sells you a method for the visible problem and stays silent about the invisible one, and the invisible one is the reason anybody buys.
What did it cost?
Years, and an amount of money I have chosen not to add up.
The time is the part people underestimate. Doing this seriously is a second job. The going out, the talking, the recovery, the constant low-level performance. I had that time and I spent it on this, which meant I did not spend it on anything that compounds.
The other cost was the avoidance. It was an expensive, time-consuming way of not dealing with my own issues, and it was extremely effective at that. As long as I had a method to run, I never had to stand in a room without one and find out how that felt.
That is the function it served. I did not understand that at the time and would have argued with anybody who suggested it.
Did getting married fix it?
No, and this is the part I most want men to hear, because the loneliness industry sells marriage as the exit.
Twelve and a half years to a woman who turned out to be a frigid narcissist with an even more narcissistic son. I thought marriage would solve the emptiness that the other approach had not. Wrong again. Instead of hundreds of meaningless encounters I got one long, soul-crushing relationship that taught me how all those patterns play out when you are trapped with somebody for years.
The marriage ended when she died after an eight-year chronic illness. She had asthma and lung disease and she would not stop her two-pack-a-day smoking habit.
I won’t pretend I was devastated.
Being alone and being with the wrong person are different problems. Only one of them attracts sympathy, and it is not the one that does more damage.
What finally made the difference?
A camera, which I did not see coming.
After the marriage ended I became a photographer specializing in women performers. Reenactors, models, actresses, belly dancers, at one point mermaids. Hundreds and hundreds of shoots.
The entire job was making somebody comfortable enough to be photographed well. Talking, putting them at ease, understanding what they wanted the images to do, then getting out of the way and doing the work. Nothing else was on the table, because nothing else could be. It was a professional relationship with a deliverable.
That was the first time in my life I spent hundreds of hours with women where I wanted nothing from the interaction except to do the job well. And somewhere in there the tension went. I stopped bracing. I could talk to a woman the way I talk to anybody, which sounds like a low bar and was not one I had ever cleared.
I do not think the camera was magic. I think the absence of an objective was, and the sheer volume of ordinary practice.
What is the lesson underneath it?
That most of the advice you have been getting is complete horseshit, and that it is solving the wrong problem on purpose, because the real problem does not have a product attached.
I am not going to tell you that women are wonderful creatures who deserve your worship. I am also not going to tell you they are evil and out to destroy you. They are people with their own needs, drives and patterns of behavior, and understanding those patterns and your own is the whole of it.
If you are not comfortable around women, technique will not make you comfortable. It will make you effective while remaining uncomfortable, which is a worse position because it hides the problem behind results. Neither will a relationship fix it, and the wrong one makes it considerably worse. What fixed it for me was hundreds of ordinary interactions with a job attached and nothing else at stake.
That sounds like weak advice compared with a system. Systems are appealing precisely because they promise control over something that feels uncontrollable. The appeal is the sales mechanism, not evidence that it works.
The book on this: The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For is 148 pages on the advice men are sold about women, what each piece of it costs, and what was left once I stopped taking any of it.
What would I tell somebody about to go all in?
Name what you are really after. If the honest answer is comfort instead of conquest, no amount of success at the second one will deliver the first.
Count the time, beyond the money. Two years of evenings is two years of evenings and you do not get them back.
Be suspicious of anything sold as a system. The people selling systems for this are earning from the system, and the loneliness is the raw material.
Do not treat a relationship as the exit. It is a separate thing with its own requirements and it will not do the job you are hoping for.
Find work that puts you around the people you are tense around, with a job to do. Repetition without an agenda did more for me than every technique combined, and I found it entirely by accident.
I still have the miniatures. Painting them was what I was doing before I decided I needed to become somebody else. Being the person who paints miniatures and reads books was never the problem. Not being able to stand comfortably in a room was, and that turned out to be fixable by ordinary practice and not by becoming a different man.
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