Rational reader Paul recently sought out my guidance for probably the single most asked for advice I receive.

I’ve read through your blog entirely, and my biggest issue is, how do I kill the beta? Every girl I sleep with, or even fool around with, I end up developing feelings for. Even if it was a one night stand or the girl is cheating on a bf with me. It’s like I have no self control; like I’m a girl that agonizes over every guy she sleeps with.

I wish I honestly had a definitive answer for Paul. If I could construct some step-by-step program, a universal template that men could all follow in order to kill their inner Beta, I’d be rich beyond my wildest dreams. Just as I said with about the Alpha Buddha, if I could find a way to bottle the essence of Alpha I’d be set for life. The real truth is that there is no simple answer to this, because each man’s conditions are unique to him. To be sure there are common roots to their problems, and common mindsets that form as results of attempting to formulate working sexual strategies (Beta Game) within the feminine Matrix, but undoing these mental schemas and reforming a better functional sexual strategy is unique to the individual.

I feel that this is the major reason Game is not taken as seriously as it should be – it’s a lot of work doing your own self-analysis and then creating a strategy to remake yourself. One of the reasons PUA gurus and the Game demigods of the last decade seem so cheap, like snake oil salesmen, is because they fail to take into account the degree of personalization necessary to truly kill the inner Beta that guys eventually have to confront. That’s an element of internalized Game that the guys doing seminars would rather not address because your degree of success, in truth how you even measure success, is entirely dependent upon you. Hooking up with girls you’d never had access to before may sell pick up DVDs; changing the inner workings of your personality is a much tougher order. If you ever look through the ‘self-help’ psychology section of a book store and wonder why there are so many books published in the topic, it’s exactly due to this dynamic – effecting a fundamental change in one’s life requires an effort that few people have the patience and perseverance for.

So with all of this in mind, let me say right now, I don’t have a map for you – anyone telling you they do is selling you something – however, I will attempt to point you in the right direction. I can’t say what will work, only you can find that out on your own, but try to bear in mind that changing yourself is a process that takes time. Even for the guy’s who have an easier go of transitioning to an internal Game-state personality, it’s still an ongoing process. I’d like to think of myself as at least a lesser Alpha (by Roissy’s measure), but that doesn’t mean I don’t trip up at times. This is what I mean by the process; you’re not going to be bulletproof and pass every shit test ever thrown at you, but be encouraged in knowing you learn from what you do wrong and adjust for the next time. There is no grand arrival moment when you know you’re an Alpha, or if you don’t like that term, there is no definitive point at which you’ve internalized Game. You don’t get some certificate of Game completion. You can, however, definitively change your thinking, it’s always on-going.

Knowing is half the battle

If there truly is a first step in internalization then it has to come from educating yourself. This is actually one of the most difficult tasks. If you’re a reader of my blog, or are at least peripherally aware of Game as a concept, this is going to seem pretty obvious, but remember that there’s an entire world of men who are still plugged in. Only a fraction of them will even be amenable to considering Game and positive masculinity, and fewer still will see its value. From our perspective it seems like a matter of course; we read the books/blogs, familiarize ourselves with the concepts, we pick what might work, experiment with ideas, evaluate the validity of them and adopt them or toss them. However what’s apparent to the unplugged seems like blaspheme to the plugged in.

Your “education” doesn’t stop once you’ve unplugged. In fact I’d argue that it’s even more vital in internalizing a new mindset since you’re now putting things into practice. One thing I remind guys who spit the red pill back up is that there is no going back. A lot of frustrated guys who discover Game and fail to apply it because they lack the social skills or they convinced themselves that PUArtistry was their easy magic formula to fuck the girl of their dreams, they tend to want to regress back into the comfortable shell of their former ignorance of intergender social dynamics. Only they find that there is no return. They see the truth in the what they’d been blind to no matter where they turn. The social interactions, the feminization, the raw deal they’ve been conditioned to accept as normal – all of that subtly reminds them of the truth they’re avoiding and they hate it. They become hostile to it.

I add this because it’s a very real danger for guys transitioning into internalizing positive masculinity. In the same respect you now have become (or should become) more sensitive to Game truths and the unplugged reality you now find yourself in. There’s a point of departure from what you thought was normal to seeing the signs around you. An easy illustration is really contemplating any gender related issue in popular media. You’ll hear a song, watch a sit-com, overhear a conversation in the lunch room, and begin to realize how surrounded you are by basic presumptions of a culture remade by feminine primacy. Understanding what your position in all of this is is crucial to internalizing a new mindset or backsliding into your old frame of thinking.

Practicing the change

It should be self-evident that applying what you’ve come to see as a new truth for yourself is vital. You need to get off the internet and field test the theories you learn here and elsewhere. Whether that means going to sarge at the clubs, or adopting a new attitude with your wife, or even the women you deal with at work, it’s really up to you. The hardest part of practicing change is the initial shock of having the people who know you question the validity of the new you. If you were to move to a new city, completely change your social circle and play the role of an asshole Alpha, no one is the wiser. However, make a radical shift in your personality with those who’ve known you for years and you’ll be a poser who’s “trying to be something he’s not”.

Human beings need predictability – it gives them a sense of control over others. When you alter yourself, or have your personality altered by an outside force, this is a threat to that predictability, so the logical counter is for others to attempt to put us back into our places. Shaming comes as a natural tactic for women, but the push is always to get you back into their frame. And that’s essentially the threat others interpret, the new you is a frame grab. Do it all at once and people will accuse your personality of being a disingenuous reaction to having been burned. Do it subtly and persistently over a time and people will be more willing to accept the change as genuine. Always insist on change, but never too quickly.

This is important to remember because your friends will be your biggest source of doubt in your transformation. They might mean well, but understand, that intent comes from a desire to see normalcy, not your best interest. The first time an old girl-friend you had a thing for calls the new you an “asshole”, it’s kind of a shock to the system. There’s always this stab at the old you who wants to set things rights, but you have to resist this impulse to take offense. It’s really hard to say “yeah, I am an asshole” as a point of pride when your whole prior life’s learning taught you not to offend others and particularly not girls you ever wanted to fuck. It’s counterintuitive to the beta in you. As sadistic as it sounds, you’ll be more consistently rewarded for your capacity to indirectly offend the women you want to get with, and the internal conflict this creates between the beta you and the burgeoning alpha you is the hardest part to reconcile. This is where most guys fail in transitioning, and this is primarily due to an unpracticed ability to keep their emotions in check.

Aesthetics vs. Social Robots

As I’ve stated before, men are the True Romantics, women are simply the vehicles for that rarely appreciated romanticism. One of the biggest gripes the post-sexual revolution feminization had with men was some prepackaged notion that men weren’t in touch with their feminine sides. We were “out of touch with our feelings”. God curse Carl Jung’s rotten corpse to hell for ever convincing popular culture that each sex had equal, but unexpressed, measures of feminine and masculine energies. Western culture has been so saturated with Jungian theory that we don’t recognize it as such. It’s become normalized to believe an idealized goal-state is a genderless, androgynous society.

Rants aside, up until the last 50 years, it has in fact been men who’ve been the sex with the most self-control regarding emotion. It’s been just this reservation that’s made Men more endearing to women. Either as enigmatic poets and artists to figure out, or as natural stoics who’s every measured expression of emotion is an event unto it’s self,  it’s been Men’s classic reservation of emotional inaccessiblity  that’s made women more interested in Men. In contemporary society, men are encouraged to express themselves as a primary way to accessing a woman’s intimacy – essentially killing any sense of mystery to unravel with full disclosure. Brain function gender differences aside, It would be my guess that men socially evolved a more reserved expression of emotion, not due to some juvenile insecurity, but rather because it so consistently worked in generating interest in women.

Not so in this age. At every instance boys and men are conditioned to think that emotional expression is a means to solving problems. Boys don’t cry, was instituted with a purpose. Unguarded easily expressed emotion is a feminine trait. It’s not that men should become social robots, deadened to all but the most intense emotion; it’s just become normalized to cheapen that expression by overuse. Displays of a Man’s emotions should be rarely given devine gifts  for women who are generally lacking in true appreciation as it is.

Unlearn what you have learned

It’s very difficult for a beta man, conditioned for so long to be emotionally available, to turn these emotions off. The good news is I’m not suggesting you do, I am suggesting you unlearn your reasons for developing emotional sentiments so easily. It’s easy to go emotionally cold as a result of being burned, it’s a much taller order to tamp that emotionality back into check when you’re really feeling good about it. Our emotions make us human and humane. It’s important to embrace that, but equally important to see how easily it’s used against you. You need to unlearn the reasons why you’re so easily emotional. Maybe it’s abandonment issues, maybe it’s a more deliberate conditioning in your upbringing.

Remember in high school, in drivers ed class, when you were taught to turn into a skid rather than turn with the skid? When we’re driving and we find ourselves in a skid our natural impulse is to slam on the the breaks and/or, worse still, to turn with the skid. Everything in our self-preservation instincts tells us to do this, but all it does is aggravate an already precarious situation. However, when we’re taught, and we practice, not hitting the brakes and not turning into the skid, often enough we make this our default reaction and we find that the car rights itself, we avoid disaster and continue safely on down the road.

You have to unlearn the old behaviors and condition new ones in order to right your course. This takes practice and repetition – even in the face of conditions that you would impulsively think would need to be reacted to otherwise.There is no substitute for perseverance.

Changing your mind about yourself is the first step. This is actually the most difficult step for guys because most don’t want to believe they need to internalize a new way of thinking about themselves. Lethargy, for the most part, can be the primary reason most guys don’t want to change. It’s far easier to create rationales for oneself as to why they are happy in their present condition than it is to critically confront and initiate real change.

Unfortunately, I can’t give you some standardized program to help you magically turn into the Man you hope to be. Only you can determine that course, but I will say this, the Man you wish to become requires you to take action. The goal posts for your own satisfaction will always keep moving away from you, and that’s a good thing. This is what inspires us to grow and mature and develop a capacity to overcome challenges. However, all this requires action on your part.

You can pore through all of the advice and sift out the wisdom from this blog and the community at large, but none of it will amount to anything for you if you wont act. I can’t begin to recall all of the times I’ve counseled young guys, giving them all manner of advice and encouraging them to put it into practice, only to have them constantly bemoan that they can’t find the motivation. More often than not it takes some traumatic experience or they have to be reduced to having nothing left to lose before they’ll really have the fire lit under their asses to become more than they are.

I don’t consider myself a motivational speaker, but at some point you have to cross the abyss and change your mind about yourself.

I really hate it when I come up with a decent blog comment that gets buried amongst 700+ more self-evincing posts and trails off into the internet ether. Such was the case over at Aunt Susan’s (once again). Use a topic like Guys Acting Like Jerks to get into a Relationship on a “Blog Her” site that women feel relatively more comfortable posting on than Jizzabel and you’re going to get a shit load of comments. Just as an aside, is anyone really surprised that it’s now women receiving public recognition for acknowledging psychological and sociological principles and dynamics that the manosphere has covered (via Game) for over a decade now?

So, guys acting like jerks to get into a relationship? Ladies, get used to the idea that the guy who you’d consider for a monogamous relationship is going to at least start off with asserting his pseudo-jerk cred. This is the logical reaction for a guy who’s been so consistently flaked on using the Nice Guy route that he fearlessly experimented with the Jerk energy and was more consistently rewarded with your intimacy and attention. And gentlemen, get used to more flakes, it’s a symbiotic self-perpetuating dynamic.

I really don’t see how this is at all shocking to anyone, women get the men they create. I think Roosh pretty well summed up this dynamic in the Future of Game:

Flaking Will Reach Epidemic Proportions

Western culture is teaching youth to glance upon the field and carefully analyze all available options before making a decision, or simply not make a decision at all. Therefore dates scheduled more than a day in advance will be rare. There will be no concept of keeping your word, being honorable, showing up, or acting respectful. Everyone will be looking out for their own. Whereas for night game in the past you had to make out with a girl to decrease the chances she’ll flake, today you have to fuck her. That’s right—to get a first date you have to already have had the one-night stand with her. This is the only way I’ve found that decreases flaking to an acceptable level in even today’s climate. If I only made out with the girl, or god forbid didn’t even kiss her, the odds I will see her again are far from assured. The dirty truth of game is how often flaking occurs, and it will happen at such a frustrating level that I’m certain more men will turn into homosexuals or resort to sex dolls because of it. This feature alone will cut the game careers short of many men who simply can’t handle the frustration and rejection. You’ll have to really want it to succeed.

Bear in mind that Roosh is prognosticating all this based on current trends and foreseeable outcomes. What I thought was interesting was the idea that even if you’re kiss closing upon your first encounter, odds are still better than half that a woman will flake for even a first date (adjust for demography accordingly). Only an F-Close really locks down a first date, and this is becoming the norm as it is now.

I’d like to consider that there’d be a few mitigating factors for flaking as have been mentioned already – the age / maturity level of a woman, differing social / sexual value of a potential mate, geographic regions and the social interactions that characterize them, but on a whole these are outliers. Generally men and women are going to be looking for as ideal a situation as their conditions permit, yet in spite of these outliers women still default to flaking on guys as commonplace. At least commonplace enough that it’s an increasingly reoccurring complaint for men.

Stoically walking away or NEXTing a flake isn’t enough. You’re not going to teach a flake a lesson when she has 6 more guys lined up (or at least she thinks she does courtesy of socia media) and all perfectly willing to put up with her flakiness if they think it means they have a shot at fucking her.

What I also thought was interesting was the 1st night lay = non-flake first date proposition. This doesn’t sit well with AFCs & White Knights because a 1st night lay or an ONS is too foreign an idea for most of them. However, now the prediction is for this to be a matter of course to GET a first date.

“Rollo, I’m sick of all these flaky attention whores, how do I reduce their flakiness?” – fuck her the night you meet her!

Now take all that to the extreme as Roosh has done, even insisting that if he kiss closes on the first meeting, odds are she’ll flake, and you can see the tears of desperation welling up in the eyes of AFCs and lower SMV women who thinking they bear the brunt of their sister’s cruelty. The bar just got set even higher for chumps everywhere as they were beginning to think Game could be their panacea.

As technology expands (social networking for example) women are finding new avenues to satisfy their attention cravings. They’re vicariously living more and more in the virtual than the actual, and finding an ability to really connect becomes blurred. In the future, Game is going to have to develop ways to break into that blurring and leave a lasting impression in the “real world”. Depending upon the circumstances, a first night lay should leave a lasting impression, but this illustrates the bigger point in that women are becoming increasingly less receptive and responsive to anything less than a sufficiently immediate shock to their dulling sensibilities. A woman outright flaking on a guy is now met with no more concern than if she’d unfriended or put someone on ignore on Face Book. That’s the association now, while at the same time she’s receiving positive reinforcement from any number of virtual sources online.

Here’s a secret – there’s no such thing as contentment.

Being content implies that life is static; it’s not, and to be honest, how boring would that be anyway? Life consists of varying states of discontent: why else would you bother doing anything? But the good news is that it’s more fun and more beneficial to manage discontent than to endure contentment (which you can’t anyway since it’s transitory at best). The trick is to understand that there are 2 kinds of discontent – creative and destructive discontent. What you choose to do with that discontent makes all the difference in the world. You will only get what you’ve gotten if you keep doing what you’ve done. Don’t allow yourself to fall back into old destructive habits of dealing with discontent. Don’t bother with anti-depressants and self-help books when a good hard workout at the gym would serve you better.

The truth is I’m always discontent, but constructively so. The minute you can look yourself in the mirror and be happy with what you see you’re sunk. You can always improve, even after achieving things that were once very important and difficult to attain. Happiness is a state of being, it’s in the ‘doing’ not the ‘having done.’ It’s not about endlessly chasing your tail, it’s about being better than you were the day before.

Creating the Fantasy

There will always be an element of fantasy and idealism that can never be realized, but always be sought after. Women (and really any gender) will always be happier in that discontent, because it makes the times that it’s gratified all the sweeter. The idea of Romance just happens to be women’s food of choice. In fact it’s very similar to shopping; it’s not the buying that gets them off, it’s the act of shopping, it’s prolonging that purchase to better savor the experience. It’s foreplay. Forestalling the climax to heighten the experience.

When I was 26 I had a workout partner named Dean. Dean was drop dead gorgeous, unbelievably cut and women would flock to the guy regularly. Dean was the guy you’d see on hotchickswithdouchebags.com with his arm around some impossibly hot HB9.5. He was also a male stripper at one of the strip clubs that had a male revue night once a month. The guy made money hand over fist and was always a crowd favorite. I was dating a stripper named Angie at the time so I was pretty familiar with the club owners. One thing I noticed about the most successful male strippers was that they were almost universally the ones who sold a story to the women in the audience as part of their act. Dean used to do a Fireman skit that would drive these women (young and old) into a frenzy. Another guy would do the hot executive fantasy in an Armani suit and give away flowers to the ladies – classy, but building up to him stripping down to a thong. The guys without an act never made as much in tips. It wasn’t as satisfying for the women as the fantasy aspect that Dean and a few others would sell. Women get off differently than men. For a guy, a hot stripper in nothing but a g-string grinding out a lap dance is enough to get him aroused. Women need that ungratified fantasy to get them aroused. They want a character to play the role they have in their head.

It’s the anticipation. I could go into detail about how all the most traditionally romantic behaviors women associate with romance originated in courtly love contests with suitors trying to out do others with poetry, sonnets, acts of devotion, etc. but these are the behaviors, not the motives that prompt them. Women need a build up. Yes, romance has an unbelievable potential for manipulation, but it’s that nagging, itching, sexual anxiety that, as much as they’d like to protest the opposite, is what they enjoy the most. Uneducated men simply don’t make this romance-to-anxiety connection and the prospect of being romantic gets distorted and borken down into simple acts – “if I bring her flowers, she’ll be inclined to fuck.” This is the AFC who thinks comfort and familiarity are the path to intimacy – wrong!

I’ve always made a point of guys encouraging and propagating a woman’s anxiety. Whether that comes by way of perceived sexual competition, uncertainty of sexual satisfaction, teasing, flirting, neg hits or positioning her into qualifying for him, the point being a sustaining of the discomfort of that anxiety. It’s the discomfort that heightens her arousal, peaks her interest and makes her pursue.

Far too often this is a principle that’s entirely lost on damn near EVERY AFC. AFCs think that perpetuating anxiety is counterintuitive because they believe in the filtering social convention that women want comfort, rapport and familiarity in order to become sexual. They swallow the “friends-first” mythology and so, deductively, they spill out their life’s story as fast as possible in an effort to make her as comfortable as possible (and get sexual as fast as possible). The AFC isn’t perceived as a woman’s idealized character for exactly this reason. There’s no fantasy entertained, no anticipation and his attention is worthless because she doesn’t have to earn it. He gets frustrated because he’s doing all the Romantic ‘things’ but she still isn’t sexual, and most likely sees him as a friend, all because he’s gone wholly over into the comfort and rapport stage by preempting the anxious, sweaty, nervous, uncertain arousal stage that she love every moment of, but will never admit to enjoying.

Law 32: Play to People’s Fantasies
The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes from disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

The Stripper Effect

There is a male counterpart to this need for fantasy. If you’re approached by a woman obviously not in (what you believe) is your “league” and she’s expressing blatant IOIs and approaches you, this is what I term the ‘Stripper Effect.’ Men are so accustomed to having to be the initiators and dealing with rejection (and potential rejection) that they’ll willingly pay for the attentions of an attractive woman giving them a $20 lap dance and this becomes physically and psychologically gratifying.

“Good decisions come from experience, and experience comes from bad decisions.”

One of the major hurdles I had to really come to terms with when I decided to start getting involved with the new male paradigm was why I was so passionate about it in the first place. Ever since I began contributing at SoSuave and the manosphere in general, I’ve always tried to make a point of not emphasizing my past sexual and relational experiences to base more global ideas upon. Women’s default position is to do just this; personalize the instance to come to a universal conclusion. Not only is it the pinacle of solipsism to think your experience should define the frame for everyone else, but it myopically ignores that exception usually prove a rule.

That was my basis for not wanting to relate too much of my own experiences. People can draw too easy a conclusion from the conditions that molded your point of view. This is actually one of the easiest ways to read a woman because their experiential sense of self-importance tends to define their reality. I wanted a more pragmatic approach, and this all came at a time for me when I decided to add a second major to my university studies – behavioral psychology with an emphasis on personality studies. Game, or what would become Game, influenced this decision for me. I wanted to know how the TV worked instead of that it just worked when I turned on the power.

All that said, I was still left with the question, why the fuck do you even give a shit whether guys unplug? I unplugged without the support of an internet community of Men comparing experiences, why even bother? I have had what most Men would consider a very good marriage for over 15 years now. I have a whip-smart daughter, I make good money, I’m successful at what I do, I’m well travelled, why is it so fucking important to make my voice heard?

It’s when I’m forced to answer questions like this that I have no choice but to apply my own personal experiences to the equation. I’m loathe to do so because it’s far too easy for critics to mold them into some purpose that serves their perspective – he’s bitter, he got burned, this is his catharsis, he’s vindictive, etc. However, it’s necessary to present these experiences as observations for a better understanding. I wont pretend to be unbiased, no one is, but I do take the pains to be as self-analytical as I can in what I offer.

So you want to know what my problem is?

My problem is living in a world teeming with young men who’ve become so conditioned to believing that anything remotely masculine is to be ridiculed, vilified and subdued until they have no concept of what it truly entails much less pass off even the possibility that it could be something positive and attractive.

My problem is when a personal, AFC friend swallows a bullet because he literally “can’t live without” the girlfriend who left him.

My problem is watching a pastor’s pretty wife leave him and 4 children so she can pursue her hypergamy after 18 years of marriage because he pedestalized her and deprecated himself every day of their marriage.

My problem is when a 65 y.o. life-long chump cries in my lap about how he’s been consistently blackmailed with his wife’s intimacy for the past 20 years of their marriage and wont man-up for fear of losing her.

My problem is talking a close friend out of killing the wife he married too young at 19 and the man she just cheated on him with in the parking lot of the motel he’s spent all night tracking her down to find with their 3 children crying in the backseat of their minivan at 4am.

My problem is civilly sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner with a hyper-religious sister-in-law and the new millionaire husband she married just 8 months after her former AFC husband of 20 years hung himself from a tree when she decided “he wasn’t the ONE” for her. My problem is staring at the brand new tits and Porsche she bought herself with the money from the home he built for her that he busted his ass for just 3 months after he was in the ground. My problem is emphatically teaching my 22 y.o. nephew how not to be the AFC his father was, while tactfully pointing out the hypergamy of his vulgarly opportunistic mother.

My problem is watching my father, though decaying from alzheimers, still playing out the Savior Schema in an effort to get laid that he’s thought should work for his entire life at 68 y.o. My problem is watching him feebley default to a behavior that obsessively motivated him to succeed until he was forced into early retirement at 53 and his 2nd wife left him promptly after that.

My problem is consoling a good friend who’s fathered 3 daughters with 2 wives and is being emotionally manipulated by his 3rd (another single mommie BTW), who’s become so despondent that he dreads going home from work to deal with his personal situation and wait’s with anticipation for the weekend to be over.

My problem is counseling a guy who thought the best way to separate himself from “other guys” was to be ‘chivalrous’ and date a single mommy with 3 children from 2 different fathers, only to knock her up for a fourth kid and marry her because “it was the right thing to do.”

My problem is dealing with a 17 y.o. girl who’d just witnessed her new boyfriend being stabbed 30+ times by her ex boyfriend because he believed “she was his soulmate” and “would rather live in jail without her than see her with that guy.”

My problem is trying to explain to ‘Modern Women’ that – after 15 years of marriage, my wife could still model swimwear and confidently respects my judgement and decisions as a Man – I didn’t achieve this by being a domineering, 1950’s caveman-chauvinist who’s crushed her spirit, but that it is an understanding and adherence to living a positively masculine role.

And my biggest problem is seeing 14 y.o. AFC symps all ready to sacrifice themselves wholesale to this pitiful, mass-media fueled, pop-culture endorsed, idealized and feminized notion of romantic/soulmate mythology, all because some other AFCs trapped in the same quicksand they are, are affirming and co-enabling each other to further their own sinking and spred this disease to other AFCs. It’s infectious, and complacency, like misery, loves company. My fear is that I’m only one Man, and I can’t possibly be enough to kick these guys in the ass like their AFC fathers were unable or unwilling to do.

This is why I bother. It really is a matter of life or death sometimes. Understanding Game, for lack of a better term, how and why it functions, is literally a survival skill. Think about the importance of the decisions we make based on uninquisitive, flimsy and misdirected presumption we have been conditioned to believe about love, gender, sex, relationships, etc. Think about the life impact that these decisions have not only on ourselves, but our families, the children that result from them, and every other domino that falls as a repercussion. We rarely stop to think about how our immediate decisions impact people we may not even know at the time we make them. What we do in life, literally, echoes or ripples into eternity. That’s not to go all fortune cookie on you, but it is my reasoning behind my desire to educate, to study, to tear down and build back up what most would ask, “why bother?”

I know, I know, Nice Guy vs. Jerk has been done into the ground many times, but I just did a consult with a young man about this and I thought you all might like to read my take on it. I think one of the easiest targets for Game hate is the terminology. It’s far too easy to apply subjective definitions to archetypes like ‘Nice Guy’ or ‘Jerk’. The standard binary response is usually, “So, I gotta be a complete asshole all the time or girls wont be attracted to me? Screw that man, I’m not into game playin'”

You can sift back through any number of forum pages of advice I’ve offered and read me over and over agin telling young men to “get in touch with their inner A-Hole.” In any of my posts, never do I state to in fact become an A-Hole. The 2 most common questions I get asked advice for is “Why do girls love Jerks so much?” and the “How do I get out of the friend-zone?” line. Both of these illustrate different ends of a spectrum. Try to think of it this way – on one end of the spectrum you have the consumate Jerk, he’s obnoxious, an A-Hole, borders on abusiveness, but women flock to the guy in droves. On the opposite end of the scale we have the ultimate Nice Guy who does and embodies everything any girl has ever told him he needs to become in order to achieve their intimacy and has internalized this doormat conditioning into his own personality. This is the guy who’ll spend countless hours on the phone being ‘friends’ with a girl or spend fortunes on gifts for her in order to buy her approval.

I think it’s important to look at the roots of the terms “Jerk” and “Nice Guy.” Lets not forget these characterizations exist because women gave them these names and classifications based on their own common evaluations. Women defined these terms, guys simply made the association with them. We tend to see these as parodies or caricatures now; abusive wife-beating Jerk or doormat Nice Guy. These are two extreme ends of the spectrum and when considering them after candid assessments, the mistake becomes falling into a binary all-or-nothing interpretation.

Another criticism leveled at Game is a fear that nominally Nice Guys will take this lesson to heart and become intolerable assholes. The fear is a new generation of arrogant pricks ‘not being themselves’ all in order to hook up.  I understand the fear of a mass of men radically leaning their personalities towards the Jerk end of the spectrum as prompted by the PUA or MRA communities. Let me be the first to say those fears are unfounded. Guys don’t search out the community, blogs or forums because they’re getting too much pussy from being archetypically ‘nice’. In fact the observation that more, shall we say, “self-centered” Men seem to be getting laid most consistently is so prevalent that there’s an entire section dedicated to it on the main SoSuave page, leads me to believe that a sudden paradigm shift to Jerk-ness isn’t remotely the threat that anyone should fear. Nice Guys, by definition, have a real tough time effectively pulling off acting like a Jerk, much less genuinely converting their personality’s to that of a Jerk.

Most men WOULD prefer to inch towards the jerk end of the spectrum, if at all, and assuming they come to believing things aren’t as they previously believed. The more common mindset for beta males is to expect that women should appreciate them for being the ‘nice’, dependable, self-sacrificing guy that every woman since his mother has told him he should be. It’s far easier to believe that the world should change for you than to accept the truth that you need to improve yourself to get the things you want. It’s the lazy man’s path to disqualify or cheapen things that he desperately wants, but lacks the motivation to change himself to get. So the hot, ‘quality’ girl he wanted before, becomes the ‘trashy club slut’ after she rejects him. The real quality girl should love/desire him unconditionally, “for who he is” rather than force him into improving himself, which in this instance means he ought to become the caricatured Jerk archetype he’s been taught to hate. Most people resist becoming what they hate, even if it’s a change for the better.

We ought to worry less about social implications of converting nice guys into jerks than making them self-aware to begin with. The risk of creating a bona fide Jerk in an effort  is a decent trade off.

“Self-love is not so great a sin as self-neglect. – Henry V

Pride is one thing that people get very confused about. It’s a healthy thing to have pride of oneself, to be proud of our accomplishments; it’s a very real source of self-confidence. Humility is an admirable quality, don’t get me wrong, but humility is only genuine when you’re confident of your own abilities. It takes a humble Man to walk away from a fight that he knows he could win, but chooses not to engage in. Generally humility is only self-gratifying, because only rarely will others appreciate it as humility (those familiar with your abilities) and not view it as cowardice, or at best a lack of confidence. Pride often appears arrogant because people of lesser accomplishments become envious, and people of better accomplishments think less of them than you do. It’s very important not to appear too perfect, but it’s equally important not to seem spineless.

It’s quite another thing to be “prideful”and this is where the disconnect comes for a lot of AFCs, particularly ones with strong ego-investments in morality, chivalry, honor, etc. My old AFC self used to struggle with this as well. The AFC sublimates himself; he self-deprecates because he believes, erroneously, that this ideology will separate him from the herd, make him “not-like-other-guys”. He mistakenly believes that he’s unique in this when actually he’s in the majority. Why? For the answer all you need do is look at the most common threads from guys just recently discovering the community.

I have no doubt that there are some guys who go from zero to PUA and then parley that into some kind of seducer-hood. I would also argue that they are the rare exceptions. Guys don’t search out community forums or blogs like this because they’re getting too much pussy. They search it out because what they’ve been doing isn’t producing the results they want. When you think about this, they’ve been doing exactly what others criticize Game for – they’re working from a script. We like to point out the flaws in autonomously adhering to a script with regards to PUA techniques; you become a social robot, not “yourself”. But from an opposite side, what you’re doing now, or have done, as an AFC (Beta Game) is equally as scripted. The only difference, and far more insidious, is that they’ve internalized these AFC “scripts” that society on whole has conditioned into them as personal investments over the course of a lifetime.

After dropping your AFC mindset for a one based on self-interest, what happened? You probably began to see results. You can hook up with women the calibre of which were previously unavailable to you before, and all it took was replacing your chump behavior and mentality with one of self-concern and self-priority. You might’ve felt like an asshole, people may have said you’ve changed or become bitter, or you’re being someone you’re not, but you couldn’t argue with the results.

One of the biggest dangers of the PUA ideal is that it does nothing to address the root problem of AFCism (for lack of a better term). AFCs don’t want to stop being AFCs. Largely, they just want their ONEitis (or their “dream girl”) to hook up with them long term and then drift back into a comfortable ‘just being themselves’. According to The Game even Mystery, with all his PUA prowess, degenerates into a simpering, borderline suicidal chump when he realizes that his PUA scripts do nothing in an LTR with Katya (his ONEitis). The most notorious PUA in modern history was still an AFC, because he hadn’t killed that mentality, that AFC internalization – he hadn’t killed his inner AFC.

Another very common occurrence is the “reformed” AFC who makes progress toward becoming more Game savvy, and as a result gets his “dream girl”, only to lose her after reverting back into an AFC frame once he’s in an LTR with her. I’m not a big Ross Jefferies fan, but he did say something very profound once, he said “teaching PUA skills to these chumps is like giving dynamite to children.” This is probably truer than he realized, because the potential for disaster is much higher. Most guys want that silver bullet, the magic formula that will get them the girl, but it does nothing to prepare them for the idyllic LTR their beta nature has fantasized about for so very long. They don’t become Men, they become children with dynamite. So are we really surprised when the guy who finally gets his Dream Girl as a result of learning Game becomes despondent and suicidal when he loses the “best thing he’ll ever have” when she leaves him? Are we shocked when his ONEitis turns out to be a BPD girl and his life’s ambitions fall into a death-spiral because he was unprepared to deal with a post-Game LTR?

The problem with just employing PUA skills to get any woman is that sometimes it actually gets you ANY woman. There’s no vetting process, no discernment, taught as part of technique. AFCs get so impressed with their new found PUA confidence and getting hotter women, getting their old friend-zone girl interested, or getting women at all, that they have no motivation to think about who they should get involved with. They’re unprepared for emotionally manipulative women, and particularly when they’re more attractive than anything they’d ever had before. They obsess. They predictably get ONEitis, but they develop a ONEitis and in such an extreme case they can be suicidal about a woman they’d previously never been able to attain.

PUA skills are tools, and valuable ones at that, but adopting a positive masculine mindset prepares an AFC for more. An AFC needs to divorce himself from deep set social and psychological schemas – he needs to unlearn the self-delusions that a lifetime has conditioned him to internalize into his personality. Giving an AFC Game skills before this transition will only condemn him to disappointment and despair in an LTR. The more important lesson is learned in the discarding of that old, beta, way of thinking, while understanding the tools and techniques to apply the new, confident, positive masculine mindset.