I keep getting emails and comments from guys about how they enjoy my blog because it comes from a different perspective than anything else they’ve read in the community. As far as I can tell, these types of guys and share a few commonalities with me, including a high level of general intelligence, rational thinking, and interest in data/science.
From some of them, I’ve gotten requests to tell my story of how I got into Game. I’m interested in sharing this because I’ve never heard of anyone with my prototype before. Maybe, by sharing my story, a few of you will identify with aspects as well.
As far as I’ve seen, most guys in the community are on a spectrum:
- Incel-types with either little to no value, extreme self-confidence issues, or (usually) both
- “Average frustrated chumps” or betas, who then either go more of the game route (approach! approach!) or the red pill route (self-improvement)
- Average guys who got laid an average amount, then had a bad breakup or got out of a long term relationship
- Naturals (either socially or looks-wise, usually both) who already got laid a ton, but wanted to learn formal Game to give them an elevated understanding and success rate
My prototype was completely different: I am a naturally below-average looking, extremely self-confident natural who, until I found Game in my mid-20s, didn’t go on dates, didn’t ask girls out, didn’t fool around, and most certainly did not get laid at all; not because I couldn’t, but because I just wasn’t interested in participating in what I felt were strange, foreign “mating dances”.
I have always been an extremely self-confident, extroverted, natural leader. My father is also self-confident and my mother was very introverted as a child, so she took steps to socialize me early on to make sure I wouldn’t have the same problems she did. I was intelligent, sharp, related well with other kids, and loved entertaining others. My mom, when I probed her about my childhood, replied “You didn’t have a shy bone in your body!”
At the same time, male-female relationships were beyond the scope of my comprehension. When I was 10, I remember a shy, attractive girl joined our class mid-year. Soon after she showed up, it seemed every conversation between the chodey guys in my class became about her, if so-and-so liked her, and the typical teases about going up and talking to her. Up until that point, we had been talking about normal fourth-grade things, like sports and video games, and considered the girls in our class nothing more than friends and equals. This girl disrupted everything. While I found her attractive, I was confused and disgusted by this behavior and refused to take part in it, walking away when conversations about her came up, or trying to change the subject.
By the time high school rolled around, I extended my social circle from “smart kids and nerds” to more of the general population. I was involved in a number of sports, clubs, and school leadership. Everyone knew me and I knew and got along with everyone. Around this time, my friends started getting “crushes” on girls and getting girlfriends. I had no interest. I was too busy with sports, video games, books, and exploring the outside world. I remember distinctly being disgusted by what I now know to be beta behavior: guys complaining at the lunch table about how “nice guys finish last” and how they wished they had a girlfriend. I remember very specific conversations with guys I found annoying who wouldn’t shut up about how certain girls in our school were “hot”. (Unsurprisingly, these guys never had any success with girls, something I always innately recognized, but only became clear when I swallowed the red pill.)
This disinterest in the opposite sex didn’t mean I wasn’t sure of my sexuality, however. Being a child of my generation, I discovered masturbation at age 12, which launched a stellar career as an internet porn connoisseur. I masturbated to porn between 1-4 times daily for the next 16 years, something which I believe gives minor erectile dysfunction issues to this day (I quit cold turkey in 2016 when I went full-time with Game).
Reading up until this point, one might assume I was getting laid a ton. I had all the boxes checked: Tons of friends? Extremely confident and social? Complete outcome independence and non-neediness? Natural leader with alpha traits?
Wrong. First of all, I was an ugly kid. Shorter than average height, pale skin, no sense of personal style, forehead wrinkling, and even worse, severe androgenic alopecia (a.k.a male pattern baldness) starting at age 14, which led to me looking like I was 35 in high school — seriously, I look younger now than I did back then. This, combined with my complete and utter disinterest in paying women any mind, meant that women didn’t show interest in me.
I didn’t realize it until later, but my high school was very tame compared to the stories I heard about other high schools since. Being friends with everyone, I attended my share of private parties. As far as I could tell, very few people were hooking up outside of actual “monogamous” high school relationships. This changed senior year, but because I didn’t drink, I stopped going to parties and never had any opportunities. My closest group of friends were all guys and most of us, as far as I knew, were virgins. There was no talk of sex or Game, but rather sports, video games, music, and movies. If anything was happening, I was painfully oblivious.
And oblivious I would continue to be. In fact, during my younger days, I can only think of a few incidents where girls showed me romantic interest:
- An extremely quiet girl in my science class who I had never spoken with handed me a folded up note and instructed me not to open it until later. I waited until she was out of eyesight, and opened it to read “I like you. – Christina”. I scrunched up my face in confusion and threw it in the trash bin.
- A girl from a rival high school who I talked to quite a bit over AOL Instant Messenger (never forget) had a boyfriend, but we hung out on occasion. I remember her specifically inviting me out on what to her must have been a “date”: we went to a restaurant and ended up back at her house, sitting on her bed when her parents weren’t home. I actually remember thinking that I would escalate in some way, which to my idiotic high school self involved dancing around like a clown and jokingly unzipping my pants/taking my shirt off while she laughed and protested. Despite my total inability to read signals, she later invited me to go spend the weekend skiing with her with her parents. I didn’t know how to respond, so I said no.
- The alternative, edgy girl from my class who spent her days hanging out in music shops and cafés and obsessing about indie films. Most considered her a misfit, but I secretly admired her because we were friends on Livejournal (never forget) and she frequently posted about her hookups and bisexuality. When we were 19 and home from college for the summer, she invited me to watch a movie in theaters. It ended around midnight, and she very cleverly “seeded the pull” during our drive home by insisting I needed to come over to her house right then and there to watch another movie. We sat in her basement and she initiated the sex talk. She was floored to find out I was a virgin, given my high school popularity. I didn’t make any moves because the door was open and her little sister was wandering around the halls. Predictably, she revealed to me when we reconnected a few years ago that she badly wanted to fuck me.
Senior year of high school, I began to realize that my personality and upbringing was truly different than most of my “normal” peers. I spent more and more time on the internet, learning about personal finance, business, technology, and began to leverage my newfound knowledge to ensure future success. At 17, I got into online poker, so much so that I willingly skipped my senior prom to 4-table Sit N’ Go tournaments, feeling smug and superior to my classmates that had blown money on rented tuxes and limousines.
It was around this time that I first heard of “pick up artists” on a popular internet forum I used to frequent. A member posted that he had been following pickup techniques to become more socially adept. This forum was fairly savage, and anyone who deviated from group norms was savagely roasted. I, not knowing any better, followed in the groupthink roasting, and thus immediately adopted the mentality: “PUAs are predatory losers”.
College rolled around, the sweet period of life where inhibitions are lifted and hookup culture runs wild. Except… not for your author. With good academics as my guide, I shipped off to a prestigious private liberal arts college, where spotting a girl over a 6 was like finding a needle in a haystack. For most guys, this would be hell, but for me, ignorance was bliss. I loved college, flourishing in the small campus environment. My school didn’t have a true party culture like I’ve come to know at state schools. Parties were centered on off-campus houses with a keg of beer and pipes being passed around freely. Fraternities weren’t well-respected and most people wouldn’t be caught dead at one of their parties. I continued my social prowess from high school, befriending most in my class and amplifying my social circle. Freshman year, I was exposed to the beginnings of my friends “hooking up” with other girls in our class. I, however, abstained. I looked at the girls they were sleeping with in their drunken carousings — primarily fat, ugly feminists with curly hair, glasses, and Birkenstocks — and wanted no part of it.
Outside of academics and social life, I truly came into myself as a man during these formative college years. I developed several hobbies (which I won’t mention here to keep this blog decently anonymous) into full-blown passions, becoming so proficient that I far outperformed anyone else I was aware of. And at 19, realizing I was going bald and my only option for not looking like a misfit was to get jacked, I started lifting weights. By my senior year, at age 22, I had packed on 20lbs of muscle and was squatting 320lbs x 10.
The muscle helped, apparently. A couple months before graduation, my roommates and I threw a house costume party. Leaning against a wall in my sleeveless shirt and face paint, a girl in one of my classes approached me and revealed that her friend in the next room thought I was cute and wanted to know if I thought the same. Very middle-school-esque. I was in a club with the girl in question, a sophomore lacrosse player, but we had never really formally met. I reciprocated the interest, walked over to talk to her, and we soon found ourselves sitting on a couch in a crowded living room. Rather, I was sitting on the couch and her drunk-off-jello-shots self had flopped her way onto my lap. Talking and looking her in the eyes, I played it cool (because I knew of no other way to play it) until she leaned over and started making out with me.
My first kiss. At age 21.
We carried on for about a minute, but I felt uncomfortable because a lot of people from my social circle were there, and at the time I felt shame about such public displays of affection. I made some excuse about how it was bad news to kiss drunk girls, and despite her very clear attempts to go hang out in my room, I continued on my way throughout the party.
Then, the cringe started. When the night was wrapping up and she and her friend were rolling out, we met again in a basement hallway. We made out again and I demanded we meet up the next day because “It was Valentine’s Day.”
The thought of my own neediness at that moment gives me the ol’ testicle shrivel. I was so excited at the thought that a girl was actually into me that I couldn’t sleep. So I stayed up in bed, googling “how to kiss” to make sure I was doing it right. I never ended up hooking up with the girl. She revealed the next day that she had a boyfriend deployed in the Navy, and my morals back then were purer than they are now. I stopped pursuing her and went back to life as normal.
I didn’t think of girls and Game again until I was out of college. I had graduated and taken a tech job downtown with a bunch of fun coworkers. One of them was a brilliant developer, charismatic but somewhat sloppy. He was a fan of nightlife and often organized our post-work happy hour bar crawls. On one of them, he mentioned the book The Game. I hadn’t heard of it, but he described the plot and that it followed a group of pick-up artists. Thinking back to what I had read on the internet, I was instantly judgemental.
“Pick-up artists manipulate and abuse women!” I argued.
“I don’t see it that way.” He countered. He told me that among the great connections he had made along the way, he had met a long-term girlfriend through Game.
Despite his reasoning, I left the conversation still vehemently against pickup.
Some months later, I had my first in-person interaction with “pickup artists”. A German girl I met while on a year abroad in Europe was doing an exchange of her own at a university in my home state, and I had hooked her up with housing for the September with a few friends I knew. I returned home for Halloween and went to a party at the college house she was living in. Halfway through the party, 4-5 drunk, loud, idiotic kids showed up. I was eavesdropping on their conversation, which — and I swear to God I’m not exaggerating any of this — went something like
“I’m getting IOIs. Go open and DHV that HB7 over there, but watch out for AMOGs”.
Imagine the very worst of a pick-up field report in the mid-2000s, and that’s how these kids were actually talking. Loudly. In front of everyone at the party. I immediately recognized them as pick-up artists, and could only stand there and marvel at the terribleness of it all. At first, I was amused, but then they began to hit on my friend. Cockblock mode engaged. I felt I had to protect my oh-so-innocent German friend: I her aside and tried to explain what a “pick-up artist” was, even going as far as pulling up the page on Wikipedia.
“They’re bad people! They manipulate and abuse women!” I repeated my tired old mantra. My friend was bemused and while she tacitly agreed, she revealed that she and one of her friends had just given out their phone number to the guy. I was shocked. These guys were low-value idiots, but what they were doing was effective enough to get numbers? There had to be something to this.
The next summer, one of my best friends from college came to visit. While visiting, he revealed that for the past year, he had joined a local pick-up lair and was “sarging” with a couple wingmen. This friend and I remain close to this day, and he’s one of the most intelligent, rational, and reasonable people I know. If he was into Game, there clearly had to be a decent side to it as well.
I began idly Googling and soon found the RooshV blog. While Roosh’s directness often offended my progressive liberal arts sensibilities, I found his reports about banging girls while traveling interesting, as I had done quite a bit of international travel myself. I subscribed to the RSS feed and read every article he posted, though, as a 24-year-old virgin, his “field reports” still very much functioned in the role of fantasy for me. One day, I noticed a link on his sidebar to his 2007 book Bang. I downloaded it and began reading…
… and my mind was blown. Instead of fantasy stories about traveling to foreign lands to get women, I was reading an intricate step-by-step manual for how to go from meet to penis in vagina for any given woman. It was exactly what I needed. The chapter I will never forget was called “Late Game”. In it, Roosh describes how to go from being alone in a room with a woman to escalating to sex in excruciating detail. It may sound strange, but this was the missing link for me. I had always wondered in the back of my mind how my friends had hooked up with girls at parties, and this section revealed every single step in viscid detail:
My mind was open, and it was time to get to work. Several months later, I left the States again for a two-year sojourn in Europe. While enjoying the party hostel scene, I began to test out some of the techniques, including kino, a concept that was completely new to me at the time. One night, while partying in the common room of a hostel, I began to kino an American girl visiting from San Francisco who was sitting on the bench next to me. To my surprise, she reciprocated, and soon we were covertly holding hands under the table. Drawing on my natural instincts, I immediately knew what to do. When the moment was right, and no one was looking, I grabbed her by the hand, led her around the corner, pressed her up against the wall and started making out with her. I then led her upstairs, pushed her into a shower stall in the girls hostel bathroom, and everything flowed from there. Bang and 12 years of watching pornography were my guide, and halfway into it she was moaning “I bet you do this to all the girls!” I laughed, thinking “if only you knew…”
That hookup instilled a new level of confidence in me. I continued throughout the next few years to take an idle interest in Game, but was too busy with other endeavors to really get into it (though I could sense that somehow, it was in my future). I hooked up with a few more girls, but they were all girls that approached me.
Then, two and a half years ago, I was sidelined with an injury and unable to work out. Bored, I downloaded Bumble, which I had heard about from a few friends, and started swiping. Amazingly, even with my terrible photos and embarrassment about “online dating”, I actually matched with some pretty cute girls. Previously, I had thought I was too ugly for most girls to find me attractive, but these apps told a different story. I immediately began to delve into research: how could I optimize my processes to guarantee as much success as possible?
The rest, as you can read about on the rest of this blog, was history.
