Social Life

When I decided to start gunning hard for significantly improved social skills in 2004, that was when I had to come to grips with how hopelessly miserable my current social skills were, and how hopelessly far behind I was socially compared to everybody else.

Some part of me enjoyed being the total outsider, because I enjoyed the independence of the man apart, the one cut off from society. I figured this would make my eventual triumph all the more poetic. It was only when I set about trying to bring that triumph about that I came to realize it would be even tougher than I’d estimated.

What I quickly discovered was that even some of the most basic social rules were alien to me. What do people talk about? How do they join conversations and move between groups? How do they not trip over their own feet socially and look dumb and find themselves excluded?

I’d already developed a good wit and the ability to tell an entertaining story by that point, so I wasn’t flying completely blind. But general conversation – interacting with other human beings in a setting in which I was not the guy on stage, cracking jokes or spinning stories or showing off my musical talents, was unknown to me. And was most human interaction... I couldn’t lean on jokes or tales or busting out freestyles to help there.

So, this one goes out to the social newbs, starting off hopelessly behind everybody else, realizing the rest of mankind has a 10+ year head start on them in learning how to socialize.

Let me tell you what I did, and give you some suggestions about what you can do.

University is a black box for many men, and guys can struggle trying to figure out how to rise to the top of the social and sexual ranks. Our host Varoon Raja interviews Girls Chase author Hector Castillo and picks his brain on how men can do just that, and many of the surprises to expect and pitfalls to avoid along the way.

Some of the subjects covered:

An attractive girl grabbed my hand and led me to the dance floor. We danced together for a couple seconds before I made up an excuse to stop dancing with her and ran off. I got scared that she would find out that I couldn’t dance and things would get awkward.

That night I walked home kicking myself, questioning what caused me to run away.

There was another time where I wanted to make a move on a girl that was my friend, but the time was never right. I was worried she might reject me and things might get awkward. I waited years to finally make a move but by that time the attraction was gone and she had moved me to the brother zone.

Finally, I have been in relationships where girls did little things that I didn’t like. But rather than bring it up early, I would bite my tongue. I was afraid to make things awkward. I would let these incidents happen until either she would lose respect for me or I would blow up on her about something insignificant.

Something that is not often discussed about success with women is how awkward things can get and how men’s fear of awkwardness leads to them never pushing the boundaries and holding back their success.

A reader named Tom wrote in a short while back with the following question:

“Can you do an article of what a man should do when he has to compete with a badboy to attract a woman?
Many thanks for reading.”

Well, that’s an interesting one.

Especially considering so much of the content on Girls Chase is aimed at turning you into the bad boy.

But what happens when you’re head-to-head with a badder boy than you?

In the article on bids for connection, a commenter asked about the following fear about random people recognizing him as, essentially, 'that pickup artist guy', and creating trouble for him:

“What's really missing is in your articles to cover - most men have rooted lifestyles, so whether they know it consciously or not they meet mostly the same people every day. We are aware that coworkers don't change daily, but other people - people who goes to the same shops, uses the same public services are pretty much the same people, and if you live in a 500,000-1,500,000 people city you think consciously that you always meet different people, but in most cases the people you see around are the same people you've seen two weeks or two days before and just don't care to remember them. I've experimented with it and seen that there are people I meet pretty much everyday or at least once in a week, because of daily schedule which is highly repetitive. I notice the effects of what they call this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem which in a nutshell means that running into the same items (people, numbers whatever) is more likely than it may seem. If you have 10000 people using public services at the same time, and then you see ~20 all the time around you, it doesn't mean that you run into the same person only 0.5% of the time, it's much higher percent actually and it grows with every day you expose yourself to the world until you expose yourself to the same and same people again and again without consciously knowing it.”

He goes on to discuss the fear of being called out by a "nagging old lady or angry psycho of some kind" who may say something mean, and notes that a "large clump of guys [may] never start the game because of emotionally feeling the high percentage of such shaming happening [i]s a big danger to their identities of "good guys" they work so hard to preserve."

It's a perfectly natural concern and, in fact, one I wondered about myself early on. It's one worth paying some attention to, in all honesty, and I'll tell you why and how to do that in this post as well.

However, the biggest lesson you'll see with this kind of thing is the same one this same commenter notes at the start of this same comment: "You've got hundreds of articles less or more discussing pretty much the same topic of "Just move your ass and do the thing, accept early failures and later get awesome results!""

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I might as well save you 10 minutes if you don't feel like reading: the advice here is going to be exactly this: just move your ass and do the thing... and this fear magically vanishes. -Poof!-

Surprised? No? Well, let's look at why, at least.

Note from Chase: this is our second article from John Turner, a member of our discussion forum. John’s first article was about “The Seduction Triangle”; in this article, he discusses the differences between men who approach doing better with women from a more broken perspective vs. men who approach it from a healthier one. Here’s John.

In recent years, it seems that the “PUA” lifestyle has gotten more and more attention in the media, and from what I’ve seen, it has been mostly negative.

This can seem confusing to beginners:

If learning pick up is going to make me a more attractive man and a better lover / boyfriend / husband, then shouldn’t girls encourage guys to learn this, and not be disgusted and irritated when the subject of pick up comes up?

Well, yes and no.

I had snorted two grams of cocaine in thirty seconds. Twenty minutes later I collapsed in the middle of the theme park.

My body convulsed as first responders rushed me to the infirmary. My heart was beating over 170 beats a minute. I only weighed 107 pounds and I had not slept in over forty-eight hours.

All this just to impress a girl.

I have been sober for years now, but I have lots of experiences with both drugs and women.

I have seen many guys try various drugs to try and get with girls – from selling pot to meet girls, to taking Molly at a rave with hopes of meeting a girl at the end of the night.

So here is my tell-all about the world of drugs and women.