Perfecting the Fantasy

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.