Exposure to Girls Desensitizes You to Them

Men fear doing many things with girls: approaching them, chatting them up, asking them out, making moves. Yet the more you do each, the less scary it gets.

I just went zip lining today through the canopy of a rainforest. Many of the trees in the rainforest were absolutely massive, with gigantic, girthy trunks that towered high up into the heavens. Each one of the colossal trees I zip lined off of was most likely hundreds of years old.

The very first time you go on a zip line, it’s a frightening experience. You’re dozens of feet up in the air, held aloft on a steel cable strung between two great trees high up in a mountainous jungle, with only a couple of metal clasps and a pair of cords keeping you attached. A single fall from that height could lead to broken legs, a broken back, permanent paralysis, or death. Then, suddenly, you leap off a wooden platform into oblivion, only to find yourself soaring through the air over the tops of younger, lower trees.

You reach the second platform, haven’t died or been hurt, then clip your gear to the next cable and zip line to the next tree. Then you do that again, and again, traveling across platforms, among the ancient trees of the jungle, slowly descending the mountainside until you reach the starting point some 90 minutes later. By then, you’re an old pro.

But it actually happens a lot earlier than that. By the third line you’re on zipping over treetops, there’s still a little fear there, but you don’t need to conquer it the way you did on the first and second zips. It’s moved to the background. With each zip you do, the fear gets a bit less and the thrill becomes more prominent. By the end of the zip line you’re forty feet off the ground zipping so fast over an ultra-long cable you can hear it buzzing under the stress, but you’re less fearful than you were at the beginning, with a much shorter, slower zip, over ground not nearly as far below you as it is at the end.

The fear never goes completely away. It’s a good thing, really; without fear, people get sloppy and make mistakes. And without fear, you can’t experience thrill – the feeling you get when you confront scary things and do them anyway.

This effect of ‘progressive desensitization’ – where you grow less and less fearful of scary things as you expose yourself to them and find that nothing all that terrible actually happens – is a ubiquitous part of human acclimation. It works this way for all things scary.

So it is with everything that intimidates you about girls, too.