The player’s journey is a very emotional one. The high points are euphoric, but the low points are crushing. The community will tell you to not give a fuck what anyone else thinks about you, especially not women. There is some truth in this. People have a wide variety of preferences, and this means that in order for some people to love you, others must hate you. One of the dirty little secrets in the PUA Sphere is that we do care what women think of us. Very much so in fact.

Men caring what hot women think of them is, to a certain extent, inescapable. One of our primary biological directives is reproducing with a (preferably) attractive female. When hot women don’t like us this puts that directive under threat. Feeling bad about this is a pretty fundamental response. Not giving a fuck what anyone else thinks of you reminds me of obnoxious people who piss everyone off so everyone hates them. They tell the people they don’t give a fuck, they won’t change their personality to please anyone. The reality is that this is an ego defence mechanism. Rather than admitting to themselves that their personality is horrendous and needs to change, they hide this behind the lie of not caring. It’s a similar thing to 30s careerist women with cunty attitudes who can’t attract men saying they need a man like a fish needs a bicycle. The truth is they have a hole in their life that no amount of lunches with the girls or ‘spiritual’ trips to Morocco can fill. Only a man can fill that hole (yes, pun intended).

I certainly don’t believe that one girl’s negative opinion of you should effect you. No matter how attractive you become, they’ll always be some women who are repulsed by you. What matters is aggregate feedback. This means that when pretty much all the women you’re meeting don’t like you then you have a problem. Denying this is bad for two reasons. Firstly, you’re denying reality. Bad things always happen in the long term when you do this. Secondly, this is an ego protection method disguising itself as high self esteem.

I’ve spent the last few weeks coming back to the game after more or less 5 months off (only a few new women fucked in those 5 months, very little time spent on game). When you exclude online game, my lay off from cold approach has been even longer. I thought I’d have some AA but get back into it quite quickly. I was wrong.

So far I’d estimate that I’ve approached 40 women, with a 50/50 split between day and night game. My results thus far have been: 7 numbers, 2 kiss closes, 2 first dates, 0 lays. I have another first date scheduled for next week, and one girl from day game who responded to my feeler text. The girls I kclosed have been a 7 and an 8. On the surface that doesn’t sound horrendous. What’s bothering me is I keep getting really bad reactions from women who are initially interested:

• A girl who opened me (I didn’t find her attractive) cut me off literally mid sentence and walked off after 2 minutes of conversation. Never had that happen before.
• Two day game dates I’ve had the plan was tea at a tea rooms then on to a pub. Both girls left after the tea rooms and wouldn’t come to the pub. So that’s a 45 minute date. My dates have rarely ended so quickly in the past. One of the dates was with an 8 who is just my type. She couldn’t wait to get away. I’ve only had two other cold approach dates this year, both from clubs, both earlier in the year. One left after an hour (feels like this is a common theme) and just didn’t like me. The other was with a girl I had first met briefly over a year ago. I didn’t hit on her then because I thought she was too hot for me. The second time I met her I was very direct and out her out on a date. The first date went exceptionally well and she seemed massively into me. Thought I was close to fucking my first 8. Probably should have pushed for the first date lay given how physical she was getting with me, but pussied out. You need to take them on the flood. The second date was a dud… just no energy and her enthusiasm for me was gone.
• I’ve had a few girls blow me out telling me directly they don’t like my sense of humour (dry / sarcastic).

I’ve had blow outs and rejections on dates before, of course. Something’s different now though. I seem to be turning initially positive reactions into negative ones. Never a good thing. It’s almost like girls are liking me less the more they get to know me. I have a theory about this. During my lay off from game a lot of my outer game atrophied, but my inner game remained. This leads to me throwing a lot of confidence behind poor outer game. When I first got into game I’d self monitor a lot due to lack of confidence. This actually helped me to some extent, because I’d filter out some stuff that girls wouldn’t like. With more confidence that filter is mostly gone. This leads to me turning a lot of girls off by saying stupid shit.

Although my current level of inner game has survived, I have a lot of work to do in this area. One of my goals for this year is to finally fuck an 8. Although I need to approach more of them to make this happen, I also feel I need a lot of inner game work to get there. For example there’s the whole sigma male thing. Do I really want to be detached from society because of my outsider / introverted nature, or is this really just an ego protection mechanism against the possibility that people won’t like me? I’m not sure how to answer questions like this on my own. There isn’t a lot out there to help guys with this. Skelator from the LSS used to do inner game coaching that everyone rated highly, but I think he’s stopped offering that now. There’s no way I’m going down the route of mainstream psychologists. I really don’t know what to do to improve in this area.

For now I’ll just keep grinding the sets out, going on the dates, taking the rejections that come and trying to learn from these. My day game coach can be some help there, but game is fucking hard to debug. All I can do is keep going, but I have to be constantly analysing my failures and tweaking my game.