The Ups and Downs of Getting Good with Girls

There’s a truly wonderful post (and equally wonderful comment section discussion) on LessWrong titled “Why startup founders have mood swings (and why they may have uses).” The authors describe the mood swings startup founders tend to go through, vacillating between euphoria and despair. I can certainly relate; in the course of running startups (such as Girls Chase), I’ve had plenty of opportunity to sit at both points on that spectrum. It’s kind of a taboo topic (nothing to make you sound unmanly like talking about mood swings), but hey, let’s tackle it.

The authors of the post above point to other examples when people are likely to experience similar mood swings:

• Early on in their first ever romantic relationship

• When deeply invested in furthering a devoted cause

• Whilst struggling to create a first great work of art or achieve something notable

And it stands out to me there’s another place endeavor I’ve experienced these same mood swings I’ve felt during my startup career, and that was during my first two or three years actively seeking improvement with girls.

I know a lot of other men go through this too, especially the men who have a burning desire to become ‘great’ with girls... or at least to improve their prospects markedly.

Yet many more men wash out of the seduction game early on, when the lows of the mood swing prove too much for them.

What I’d like to discuss in this article is why the mood swings get you, what you can expect when you apply yourself to improving with women, and how to stack the decks in your favor to prevent yourself from ‘washing out’.

Great Emotions Come from Great Uncertainty

If you have a routine schedule, think about your routine.

You wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, get dressed, and go to work or school. At some point you get lunch; at some other point the day is over. Perhaps you go to the gym, or maybe you join your coworkers at a happy hour. Then you grab dinner, relax for a bit reading a book (I’m in love with my Kindle right now) or watching a TV show or playing a game, take a quick shower, and go to bed.

Your emotions throughout are mostly pretty dull, right? On any given day, you may feel frustration, annoyance, pangs of depression; you may feel satisfaction, confidence, and good. But overall, none of these emotions is usually too extreme... they’re just... dull.

The reason they’re dull is because everything is mostly expected. If you’re not doing what you feel you should be doing, you’ll feel antsy or depressed. If you’re feeling rather on track and like you’re making progress in things important to you, you’ll feel good. But day-to-day, these usually won’t be extreme emotions; you won’t look in the mirror and say, “Oh God, what am I doing, I’m a failure; I’m completely wasting my time,” and on the other hand you won’t be punching the air with a stupid grin on your face saying, “I did it! I knew I could do it! I’m a bloody champion!” like you just knocked out Apollo Creed.

Extreme emotions are a result of dealing with extreme uncertainty. Just like you may enjoy watching a movie or playing a computer game, but the emotions are never as powerful as the first watch or play through when you have no idea what will happen next (e.g., the nail-biting suspense in What Lies Beneath, movies-wise; the sucker punch at the end of the first Fallout game, games-wise), it’s the same with life: the greater the uncertainty you find yourself dealing with (or cause yourself to deal with), the greater the emotional swings you will experience.

It is this way in running a business or falling in love, and it is this way when you set out to learn success with girls from a point of previously being a dud with them.

Why the Mood Swings?

The authors of the LessWrong piece posit the mood swings have two (2) purposes:

• When your mood swings up, it’s to buoy your enthusiasm and generate the drive you need to put the work into succeeding at your endeavor

• When your mood swings down, it’s the result of setbacks, and serves the function of causing you to reassess everything, discard what’s not working, and course correct if necessary
  

Commenters below the article note that despair has social signaling ramifications (e.g., when you are despairing, this tells those around you things about you and impacts their own emotions / how they deal with you), or alternately suggest that despair may not be a result of evidence you need to change things so much as it is an oversensitivity to lack of progress in a nonlinear progression (i.e., maybe you need to go talk to girls for X amount of time with no visible progress, then suddenly at the end of X period of time your progress lunges forward; however, before your reach the end of X time, it feels like you are making no progress and getting no better, and you despair).

The commenters have no quarrel with the authors’ description of the ‘up’ mood’s function, but there’s some disagreement on the detail of the ‘down’ mood’s function.

Additionally, the authors make the observation that when you are in the ‘up’ mood, your ability to think critically gives way, to a certain extent, to resolve and momentum.

In other words, according to the authors, the ‘up’ emotions are when you say, “Let’s do it!” while the down emotions are when you say, “Should I do it? And what exactly is the it I should do?”

I think it’d be helpful to define ‘up’ and ‘down’ in clear terms:

• Up is certainty
• Down is doubt
  

And as it applies to seduction, when you feel certain it’s when you know it will work, or that it is working, and success is within your grasp (or perhaps already yours). Buoyed by that enthusiasm, you forge on, and do what must be done.

Conversely, when you feel doubt, it’s when you doubt if it will work, or doubt that it even is working, and think success may even be out of your reach. Stopped cold by this uncertainty, you sink into rumination, and ask yourself if this plan of action you have is really what you ought to spend your time on... or not.

That Creeping Doubt...

I’ve noticed in my years teaching that a lot of men experience doubt of some sort or another about whether they can really learn to do well with women.

That ranges from men who struggle with inferiority concerns, like what William yesterday discussed, to men who experience only momentary, fleeting doubt following a particularly difficult outing or scenario, to men who wonder if this stuff is maybe even all made up and just a conspiracy or a marketing ploy (to which I’ve said: go test and see for yourself!).

I’ll tell you, everything I’ve ever done that was hard to do has involved a great deal of self-doubt, mixed up together with a great deal of resolve. It’s an odd combination. I can certainly tell you when I started cold approaching very regularly, the first six months or so were punishing, with huge amounts of self-doubt and more than a handful of times I remember saying, “I can’t do this. Maybe it works for other men, but it doesn’t work for me.” Plus a few (sparse) moments of victorious euphoria. Much more despair than euphoria, though.

However, I’d take a few days off after a big letdown, recover a little bit, and go right back out. I’d already quit once, at 18, and after a four-year hiatus, I was right back there learning how to talk to girls again; I just straight up quit being a quitter. Nothing was going to dissuade me again at that point. I was sick of quitting.

Those periods of doubt are critical though. As the LessWrong article points out, those are the periods during which, once you’re past the initial bad emotions, you sit down and say, “Okay. It’s obvious I’m not progressing fast enough or in the ways I want. So what do I need to change?”

The danger of the doubtful times are those are also the times when you think about giving up. You essentially go through the evidence you have at hand:

• What you’ve experienced directly
• What you’ve seen with your own eyes
• What your peer group tells you is true
• What other sources tell you is true
  

... and then you form a belief.

In the case of something like seduction, if:

• You’ve not had any success meeting women
• You’ve never seen a guy use game to get girls
• Your peer group tells you that seduction stuff is bilk
• And you spend a lot of time reading media stuff that says, “Men’s self-improvement is laughable! Just be yourself!”
  

... that’s when you look around, realize you really don’t have anything to support this belief that all this “going out and talking to girls” nonsense might actually lead to dates, sex, or a girlfriend, and you start to feeling like you’ve been wasting your time, or maybe even feel ashamed, or like you’ve been duped.

And then you give up.

(of course, the nice thing about life is chances are you’ll probably still meet a girl sooner or later at SOME point, even if you do nothing to improve yourself with women... but not necessarily your ideal girl, though scarcity has a way of making less-than-ideal women seem pristine)

How to Stack the Decks in Favor of ‘Ups’

If you take a look at the startup world, what do you notice about the startups with the most runaway success?

Typically, they:

• Have two cofounders who work well together
  
• Are founded by folks already experienced in their industries
• Seek out investors knowledgeable in their industries who can provide guidance, recommendations, and introductions to key people
• Have a relentless focus on pulling in the best people
  

Those are all things that continually provide increasing amounts of ‘certainty’, aren’t they?

If you have a good cofounder, he can steady you in your moments of doubt (and vice versa).

If you’re experienced in your industry, you know whatever opportunity you’re chasing is a real need your industry has, and you’re not stabbing in the dark nearly so much as the guys with no industry background who randomly say “Hey, how about we build ‘Twitter for dog lovers’?! It’ll be huge!” only to realize once they start trying to do it that this is way harder than they thought it’d be and they don’t even know if there’s demand for their idea.

If you have knowledgeable investors on your board, they provide an outside view and can point out things you may be too close to the action to notice.

Have the best people on board, they will typically be there because they believe in the mission (if they didn’t, they’d be somewhere else – if you’re among the best, you get to pick and choose your place of employ).

And the same is true with seduction.

When I was new, I immersed myself in the best seduction forums I could find, immediately sought out coaching so I could see talented guys in action and get my butt kicked into gear, surrounded myself with naturals and talented wingmen I could talk shop with, watch, marvel at, and be inspired by, yet otherwise kept talk about seduction to myself, so the more mainstream folks around me in my school and later my workplace wouldn’t discourage me with “Oh that stuff doesn’t work” or “You’re wasting your time” quips (the worst thing in the world about discouragement is that folks who discourage you never offer to help you find a better path; they don’t say, “That doesn’t work; here, let me show you what to do, come out with me this weekend,” they just go “lol lol, you should give up.” Depressing. Don’t talk to ‘em).

When you do this (and you can do this for anything you want to learn: weight lifting, calisthenics, rock-climbing, entrepreneurship, dance, language-learning, you name it), the downs don’t last as long and are not as severe, because you know the goal is achievable, and you have a variety of different examples around you of it being achieved.

You essentially make it easier to get more ‘ups’, and avoid being completely crushed and kicked out of the game by ‘downs’.

Learn to Love the Mood Swings

If you’re getting mood swings, it means you’re working hard in a challenging area filled with uncertainty (unless you just have a mood disorder; that’s a different subject).

If you’re not someone with a mood disorder though and you’re just doing something fiendishly hard, learn to love those mood swings. The ‘up’ times are the ones when you really get to put in phenomenal work and take shots and feel rewarded for what you’ve accomplished, and the ‘down’ times are the ones where you zero in on optimizing your strategy: cut the stuff that’s not working, and try out new stuff that might.

Be careful about not stacking the decks in favor of success, or surrounding yourself with the wrong people.

If you want to build a million-dollar business and you surround yourself with folks working minimum wage jobs who think that’s a pipe dream, you’re going to get discouraged and throw the towel in a lot more easily than if you surround yourself with folks who are also working to build million-dollar businesses, and spend your time getting business coaching and hanging out on business forums and going to business meet-ups and conventions.

You’re responsible for your own resolve – because you are no more or less resolute than the people and influences you surround yourself with. All you know is what you see, hear, and experience... so mind the influences you have around you carefully, and hand-pick friends, confidantes, and experiences such that they push you toward where you want to go, not cause you to lose heart.

And don’t let the mood swings get to you too much. They’re a part of any noble pursuit you toss yourself into without a lifeline – and they put you in rare company, in a place those “cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat” Teddy Roosevelt talks about will never know.

Chase Amante