Playing with Fire

From How to Be Cross Eyed: Thriving Despite Your Physical Imperfection — a mémoire and lifehacking manifesto

I’m an unapologetic seducer. A man does not really savor life or liberty if he does not devote himself to the pursuit of that most exquisitely intimate of female embraces.

The arduous pursuit of alluring female curves is the crucible through which a young man should pass. Modernity offers little in terms of grueling and challenging ordeals through which a boy becomes a man. I’ll suggest that the art and practice of seduction is that acclivous path. In this book, I discuss a number of paths to personal development but none of them are as terrifying, dangerous, exciting, fun, challenging, and viscerally fulfilling. I see that most base of drives for genetic longevity as inextricable from meaningful personal growth. Seduction is a tool for transformation where your genes are the wind in the sails of the ship you captain.

You might be saying

Jonathan, you sound like a pickup artist. I’m not sure about pickup artists, they seem kind of sleazy…

Well, all men are pickup artists. Some of us are just honest about it and devote ourselves to getting good at it. And I must be pretty good at it because I’m no longer a practicing pickup artist, I got married. You should be a bit skeptical of pickup artist gurus that never get married or into happy long-term relationships. What is between your two legs is ultimately not a toy merely for your own self-gratification, it’s for procreation and to intertwine masculine, aggressive energy synergistically with inspiring feminine energy. A true seducer should eventually seduce the enduring devotion of a woman, not just her body and lusts for a night or two. Pickup should be a path, not a destination.

Seduction is risky

You might get punched in the face by a jealous boyfriend in a nightclub (like I did once) but there’s a much greater risk of inviting a dangerous woman into your bed and life that intoxicates your capacity to make good decisions. The government outlaws drugs that intoxicate the mind, under the influence of which we make idiotic life-ruining decisions. If I wasn't so libertarian I would say that the government should apply that same standard and outlaw women who ruinously abused their feminine power over men.

I’ll share a few entertaining and illustrative stories from my life as a seducer.

But you might be thinking…

Oh jeez! Is this guy still going on about his sex life?

Well, in the wacky world that is modernity the sexual marketplace is becoming increasingly asymmetrical and it’s very confusing and difficult for young men yearning for female love and affection. It’s even more difficult to find a quality girlfriend and win her devotion and commitment. Single men are more or less looking for three things in a girlfriend…

1. A woman who is attractive enough to be sexy in her own way.
2. A woman who has a pleasant, feminine personality that can hold a conversation.
3. A woman with a modicum of decency and morality who isn’t totally dishonest, crazy, or entitled.

Just ask the single men you know if they are meeting many women who meet those three criteria — they’ll tell you that girlfriend-material girls are unicorns nowadays. The attractive girls they meet are ridiculously narcissistic and entitled and the girls with decent personalities are pretty unarousing. They’ll complain that the sexual marketplace is totally unfair, that girls would much rather be in the harem of a pseudo-celebrity guy with 10,000 Instagram followers than they would be the girlfriend of a humble software engineer that makes a $100,000/year salary.

Despite being disadvantaged by a conspicuous physical imperfection I’ve managed to have a quite rowdy sex life across three continents while avoiding all the life-ruining landmines. Eventually, I met and married an extremely devoted and attractive woman (and I have less than 400 Instagram followers!) So I think my experiences are worth talking about…

The Colombian politician’s daughter

At a language exchange (which are great places to meet girls, by the way, I met my wife at one actually!) in Medellín, I got to chatting with a cute and very opinionated young political science student. As a seducer I try to be disagreeable by default as opposed to agreeable, I expressed my general disgust with politics and disapproval of her chosen field of study. She laughed and admitted that she was inspired by her father who she described as a principled and hardworking local politician. After a bit more cheeky conversation and banter, the bar began to blast annoyingly loud reggaeton music and we engaged in a bit of good old Colombian bump n’ grinding. My bump n’ grind form was not awful but not up to Colombian standards of rhythm (I was pretty new to the country) which she teased me about (Protip: bump n’ grind slow. Most guys try to bump n’ grind way too fast!)

We exchanged Facebook contact details and I invited her to dinner at a local organic restaurant I wanted to try because I noticed her birthday was approaching. We shared a few laughs over tasty morsels, she teased me about my poor Spanish pronunciation and we got into a little argument about Coca-Cola of all things; she loved Coca-Cola and I let her know my true feelings about the demonic fizzy sugar water.

Whenever possible when on a date, try to have a backup or secondary destination, so I had found a party on Facebook events nearby. After dinner, I took her hand and led her toward a large party hostel that was nearby. The hostel was hosting a reggae band that I thought might be fun. We crossed a bridge over a little stream, which I explained to her was the Rio de Medellin (Protip: when in foreign lands with foreign women always treat them to a made-up bullshit geography lesson), even though it was a bit awkward I leaned in and kissed her which she was receptive to. We lingered for a moment kissing there on the bridge, then I changed the conversation topic and we headed to the party. The reggae band sucked, eager to get away from the screeching Caribbean tunes I ordered us two cheap beers and suggested we check out the rooftop lounge of the hostel. The rooftop was empty thankfully, as we kissed and caressed I foolishly set down our beers on a banister that they promptly rolled off and fell from. Later I would joke that we almost killed a girl there because a female shriek rang out as the beers shattered on the pavement five stories below us. We promptly exited the party, glad to see that there was nobody maimed by raining beer bottles. I kissed her and put her in a taxi.

We’d see each other here and there, she invited me to come to see her sing in a choir that she participated in. Then I had something small to celebrate and I suggested that we get dinner and that I’d get us a room somewhere. This goes against the pickup artist dogma that you should never tell a girl your plans to sleep with her. Pickup artists suggest that you invite a girl out for a drink and then just nonchalantly invite her back to your room to watch a movie or whatever but I’ve had pretty good luck with being a bit more direct. Often I’ve been in a situation where I had been on a date or two with a girl and was eager to see if she actually liked me enough to sleep with me or be my girlfriend so I’ll just suggest that we get dinner and a room together for a romantic evening.
This is a step above casual sex and if you’re dating a relatively conservative girl she’ll appreciate your chivalry and likely accept. It gives her the chance to shave down there prior and wear something that makes her feel sexy. Also in this crazy #metoo era, it mitigates the chances that she’ll impulsively sleep with you, regret it and cause you a world of trouble. In my experience it also makes the first-time sexual encounter a whole lot more comfortable; you won’t be in a huge hurry to close the deal and you get to have morning sex when you wake up together.

We did indeed have a magical night together and she became my girlfriend, at least for a while there, but I still wasn't culturally acclimatized yet and I failed to deliver her that special cocktail of jealousy, passion, and drama that Colombianas demand from their amante.

Russian roulette

I cold approached a cute Russian woman smoking at a happy hour in Denver who turned out to be quite the Slavic disaster. It turned out that she liked to drink so we got drunk and made quite the sloppy scene making out and groping each other. The next night, eager to impress, I invited her out on a date. I had befriended this woman who owned a nice Lincoln Towncar and operated a cut-rate unlicensed limo service, pre-Uber this was great for my dating life because I’d invite a girl out on a date and tell her not to worry about transportation — I’d send my limo. My very chatty chauffeur friend would pick her up and tell her all about how cool I was while delivering her to me.

I was a real socialite at the time and had lined up quite the night of revelry. We ate a delectable dinner at a restaurant operated by a very cool guy I had met at the nightclub where I’d “worked.” Over sushi she mentioned that she was at the tail end of a divorce; a serious red flag that I speed right past. Then we made an appearance at a penthouse party nearby, while we made out on a 22nd-floor balcony I pointed out to her the towering new Four Seasons hotel. She looked deeply into my eyes and told me point-blank in her alluring accent "Jonathan let’s have sex there tonight!" But I had one more fabulous place to take her first.
Another friend of mine, a popular local rapper was performing at a fire and ice party at a nightclub. Surrounded by ice sculptures and fire dancers, I fueled our debauchery further ordering double-shot cocktails of patron-redbull. Inspired by the pyrotechnics of the party, I ordered a shot of Bacardi 151 so I could show off to everyone my fireball-blowing skills. But the thing about blowing fire is that you need a torch, something to ignite the liquor as you blow it out of your mouth, often paper rolled up will work but I had none so I took out a dollar bill, rolled it up, and lit it up on a firepit on the nightclub’s patio. But it turns out that dollar bills don’t actually burn that good, thus I spit out the potent Bacardi into the fire pit causing a bit of an explosion! Somehow I’d drunkenly got a bit of the Bacardi on my face as well and my right cheek caught on fire (I have a barely visible scar there now) thankfully my buddy and my date deftly slapped out the fire on my cheek and doused me with a drink. The Russian woman brought me to the bathroom and applied her makeup to my now burnt face.

My appetite for drunken idiocy finally sated, we stumbled out of the club and I hailed a taxi. I had just been paid by a new web development client and was feeling a lot richer than I actually was — "Driver, take us to the Four Seasons Denver, please!" I swiped my card at the front desk at 3:10 AM, and we checked into a swanky $ 245-a-night room.

After that very hot night, she was downright infatuated with me. But I quickly became quite bothered by her drunken antics; I remember once she showed up at my place, we had a little champagne but she wanted more to drink so we drove to the liquor store. She turned the wrong way on a one-way street, she swerved and pulled a very illegal U-turn right in front of a cop, I thought Oh shit! This ridiculous woman is about to be arrested for driving under the influence! But amazingly, the cops just let her go.

It also turned out that she wasn’t at the tail end of a divorce. She was in the middle of the divorce and her husband - who had paid handsomely to have her imported and naturalized from an impoverished (and slightly radiated) village somewhere not that far from the Chernobyl exclusion zone - wasn’t happy with me but he was a quintessential cuck. He put up with her bad behavior and we even had an awkward phone conversation once trying to troubleshoot a problem with her laptop.

Finally, I considered the opportunity cost of dating this indecorous woman and broke up with her. Some yelling and tears ensued, she would show up at my place drunk at night trying to seduce me but finally, she accepted that we were over.

The evil tax agent

I had figured out how to optimize my Facebook profile for the algorithms to attract friend requests from my target demographic of single women who liked to party. This amounted to just joining a lot of the local Denver nightlife Facebook groups and marking myself as attending all the major events happening in town and friend requests from local cuties poured in. One was an attractive American-Mexican woman who apparently worked for the state revenue office getting the taxpayer to pay up. I teased her, asking "So just how much did the devil pay you for your soul?"

That weekend she’d meet me at the nightclub where I “worked,” within about five minutes of meeting we were making out and lots of sexy dancing ensued. About 30 minutes after that we found a bit of seclusion on some giant couches in a VIP area of the nightclub. After a sexy lap dance, she unzipped my pants, I put on a condom, she pulled her shorts and panties to the side, and we had sex right there in the nightclub! Actually, the third girl I’d had sex with in a nightclub that summer.

She didn’t waste much time in revealing herself to be extremely exploitative. In between our face-sucking and fucking in the nightclub, I had invited her to join me in a boot camp-style fitness class the next morning. When she picked me up from my apartment downtown she suggested that after the fitness class, we go for a shopping spree at the fanciest mall in town. At the time, I had pretty non-existent standards with women and I was probably still a bit drunk from the night before so I shrugged and agreed. As we sweated out the booze from the night before in the fitness class, I got to thinking a little more soberly about her demand for gifts and wondering just how much damage this woman could do to my bank account balance in a retail environment. I counter-proposed that instead of the fancy mall, we go to a discount retailer instead and I (shamefully!) bought her a pair of $20 shoes.

She checked off nearly every bad woman stereotype you can think of…

• She smoked.
• She really liked to drink.
• She liked cocaine.
• She was a single mother of two.
• She was pretty materialistic. I’d discover that she really didn’t need gifts from me, she had a walk-in closet full of clothing and shoes!
• She would drink and drive.
• She would complain and gossip about her colleagues, friends, and babies’ daddy.
• She was non-monogamous, telling me that it was OK I slept with other women as long as I used protection and didn’t bring her an STD.
• And she was a corrupt statist, a cog in the beast, extracting taxes from the hardworking Coloradoan taxpayer. Although, she admitted to me that she was susceptible to bribery and could conveniently make files disappear if properly motivated.

At the time I was still pretty brainwashed into the mainstream thinking that it was good that she was such an empowered, ambitious woman having a fruitful career while raising two children and still finding time to party recklessly. A tagged photo on Facebook indicated to me that she’d lied about her plans one night when we were supposed to hang out. Somehow that finally crossed a line and I decided to break up with her, which oddly made her cry.

 Last minute resistance

Back to Colombia, after a few years there my skills on the dancefloor had markedly improved. I’d met a cute girl, Lina, after some sexy dancing we had a rather bland conversation and exchanged phone numbers. Disabuse yourself of the notion that seduction requires real conversational fireworks upon first encounter, all there needs to be is a little interest and it’s worth asking for her contact details. The next morning on Facebook Events I saw that there was a gastronomic festival in town, which are a great casual date idea. Girls love to peruse and nibble from a smorgasbord of cuisine.

About five minutes into the date she mentioned that she had a fiance named Rajesh in Canada  — I thought, what a time waster! Oh well, I guess we’ll just be friends, but my devious side prevailed — Jonathan, just treat this like a normal date. She’s here so she must be interested in you. Believe her actions, not her words. I led her by the hand to the festival. As we explored the culinary offerings hand-in-hand she obnoxiously texted Rajesh - even showing me the cute GIFs he sent her but I didn’t let it phase me. I just flirted and continued making incidental physical contact. We sat down for a beer and even though she was making things very clear about Rajesh, I leaned in and kissed her, of course, she succumbed. After locking lips for a few sweet moments I changed the conversation topic totally, not wanting her to get all logical and guilty about her cheating on poor Rajesh there in Canada (sorry, Rajesh!)

If I can synopsize all my seduction advice to men in one line it’s…

If there’s a slight chance that you can kiss her. Do it!

Even if it’s awkward, even if it’s a bit unexpected, even if your bodies and heads aren’t quite facing each other just right. if you detect the slightest attraction from her just go for it. There’s only upside to trying to kiss a girl…

• If you try kissing her and she turns her cheek, flip the tables and make a joke about her trying to kiss you.
• If you try to kiss her and fail at least she knows what you want and she knows that you’re an audaces fortuna juvat type of guy. You won’t be friend-zoned.
• If she reproaches you for your boldness. Just apologize, "Sorry! You looked very beautiful there for a moment and I had to try. You’re the woman, it’s your job to resist I know, but it’s my job to try." Then try to kiss her again, if she really doesn't like it she’ll leave and by all means let her go!
• If she staunchly resists kissing you, you know she’s really not that interested and you won’t waste your time.

I’ll add a cultural nuance, if she had told me that she had a Colombian boyfriend there in Colombia I probably would have walked away from the date after five minutes — Latina women are infamous for cheating on their partners and Latino men are infamous for getting violent revenge on guys like me. I’ve heard plenty of stories of murders that resulted from affairs, in fact, it’s such a part of the culture that there’s a legal provision in the law for crimes of passion. I wasn’t nearly so worried that Rajesh would stab me in the neck with a broken bottle for messing around with his girl.

I’ll also add that Colombia is about as far away as you can get from the progressive dating standards in more developed countries. Women expect men to aggressively manhandle them. If they don’t like it they’ll just walk away, they won’t report you to the police for some kind of nonsensical sex crime. Which is just more libertarian, isn’t it?

I invited her back to the hostel where I was staying to watch a movie. You might think that girls wouldn’t be interested in a guy staying in a hostel but it’s never been much of a problem for me. The problem was, I didn’t have a private room reserved. I pleaded with the hostel receptionist to get me in a private room ASAP, frustratingly they took about 20 minutes to get me a room and a key. Good thing I had been doing a lot of game and had about 20 solid minutes of good material to keep a Colombian girl amused and guilt-free about her cheating! If we had just sat there waiting I’m sure she would have gotten cold feet. Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.

Finally, we were cuddled up on a bed in front of my glowing laptop playing my go-to pre-seduction movie, Devil by M. Night Shyamalan, it was time to take things slow. I would kiss her, caress her but then withdraw and direct my attention back to the movie. On the taxi ride on the way over, I had told her with a little bit of a cheeky grin

"You can come over to watch a movie but we aren’t having sex. I need to Skype with my family later. Don’t get any ideas. I’m a nice boy."

A pretty blatant lie that has worked consistently for me, it gets girls wondering why you wouldn’t sleep with them. I suppose it gives them the plausible deniability that they need. She was a bit reluctant but never told me to stop touching her or left and she eventually stripped off her clothes and asked me if I had a condom. Afterward, she thanked me for the lovely day before hopping in a taxi.

It certainly wasn't the most glamorous or romantic seduction, but it’s illustrative of the power of persistence. Funnily, we arranged to meet again the next week but a chance encounter at a grocery store cock blocked me. I was out of condoms and low on lube, so I went to the grocery store to pick some up. She then texted me about 30 minutes before she was supposed to come over, saying she couldn’t come. I pressed her a bit further as to why, apparently her mom was behind me in line at the grocery store, saw that I was buying condoms, lube, and coconuts (clearly I was up to no good!), and had forbidden her from leaving the house. So, of course, I asked "How did your mother recognize me?" Apparently, she had shown her mother my photos, videos, and website before meeting me for our first date!

She just wanted a DVD player

In a sweaty reggaeton bar, I met Andrea, a curvaceous young Colombian girl, looking hot in white pants and accompanied by an awkward lesbian friend. My Spanish and Colombian vertical doggy-style dancing technique had improved and after dancing a few songs and buying her a cheap beer she was ready to leave with me. The obstacle was obviously the lesbian friend, but she was all too happy to leave her friend to spend the night with me when I offered to pay for her taxi to leave.

An amusing little relationship ensued, this is the one girl I’ve dated in the last 10 years that didn’t have a cell phone. She messaged me on Facebook a few weeks later and I invited her out for a drink on a Sunday night.
By this time I had figured out a pretty good strategy for scheduling dates with the notoriously flaky Colombiana — I’d schedule dates with two girls about 90 minutes apart. I’d also been talking to a girl named Isabel with great tits, but I scheduled to meet with Andrea first because I’d already slept with her and thought it more likely that she’d show and that I could sleep with her again. I told them both to meet me nearby the coworking space where I worked and Andrea being Colombian was of course late, very late. She didn’t have a cellphone so I’d need to go wait at a coffee shop where I told her to have the taxi drop her off. So, I headed down and waited and waited, she was about an hour late. Then Isabel texted me, she was there early just a block away ready for our date. I’d have to choose, go on a date with Isabel or wait around for Andrea to hopefully show up. I wanted to get laid and I wasn’t sure if Isabel was ready to sleep with me, Andrea was a pretty sure thing. I texted Isabel "I’m sorry. I have a huge disaster with one of my websites that I need to fix now. Go wait for me at the hostel where our friend works." Then I waited and waited some more at the coffee shop, my phone battery was low and eventually died, so I couldn’t contact either girl now. The coffee shop was quite popular and I imagined a now quite irate Isabel walking in and finding me not fixing my website so I sort of hid behind a large plant. I waited and waited some more, it now seemed that Andrea was flaking on me! The coffee shop was closing up and it was looking like I had chosen poorly but I decided to wait a bit more and finally, Andrea emerged from a little yellow taxi dressed to the nines and wearing ridiculously high heels. We walked very slowly to a nearby sushi joint, she teetered along in those soaring high heels holding onto me for balance, I imagined the fireworks that would ensue if we ran into Isabel who might still be in the area. We ordered some sushi to go and ate it on a nice patio at the coworking space overlooking the city. Then we went inside the now empty and darkened coworking space, she gave me a lapdance on a white couch, stripped down and we had some very hot hoping-to-not-get-caught sex right there. Funnily, I was later kicked out of that same coworking space for trying to repeat that same move. Hey, they located their coworking space directly in the middle of the raucous Medellin nightlife district, what did they expect!

A few weeks later, Andrea and I met again at a nightclub, she got me drunk on Aguardiente, Colombian firewater, and in between vigorous vertical lap dances finally revealed her true intentions, she wanted me to buy her a DVD player. Bitch please, I could make it rain DVD players! Not wanting to get into a silly argument in a nightclub at 2 AM, I shrugged and agreed. We stumbled out of the nightclub and for the first time in my life I went to a sex motel — which sounds not very classy but in Colombia, they know how to do sex motels. You don’t have to go through the awkward process of checking in with a bored front desk receptionist, you just ring the doorbell and are ushered into a very 80’s disco-esque private room with a stripper pole, hot tub, and cool lighting. Funnily, the motel employee is in the room’s little refrigerator! Well, they aren’t in the refrigerator, there’s a corridor on the other side of the minibar refrigerator that cleverly serves as a pass-through to pay for your night’s stay.

On my way home the next morning with a hangover from the night’s debauchery I decided it was time to shit test Andrea. Shit test is a phrase PUAs use to describe arbitrary challenges that women throw up to test a seducer, perhaps a more accurate phrase for them is congruency tests.
I had grown a little irritated with Andrea because every time we drank together she tempted me with cigarettes, she knew that I had quit smoking cigarettes and didn’t want to start again. I was also growing bored of her and didn’t want to buy her a stupid DVD player. Once I transactionalized the relationship by buying her a DVD player it was just a matter of time before she asked me to buy her a smartphone, pay her rent, or pay for something for her bastard child. I messaged her the next day, letting her know that I hated her tempting me with cigarettes and that I couldn’t see myself with someone that smoked them. Maybe she’d apologize, quit smoking around me, and not ask me again to pay for stupid things for her, but she didn’t.

Clearly, I’ve had some questionable women in my life…

Criticizing women is a significant and growing cultural taboo, we’re supposed to believe that all women are wonderful. In fact, it’s a well-recognized and studied cognitive bias; we’re inclined to believe that women are naturally good, gracious, caring, fair, and trustworthy. I’ve certainly known a lot of women that were but there’s also a lot of downright vicious, deceptive, selfish, and broken women out there. In retrospect, I could have saved myself a lot of headaches, drama, stress, and some money by being more attentive to glaring red flags and having unyielding standards.

Many of the pickup artist gurus teach men to just try to seduce any woman that you find attractive. This is pretty bad advice because you will end up quite literally sticking your dick in crazy and the bad women are the ones much more likely to not make you wear a condom or tell you that they are on birth control when they are not. Is the visceral fleeting thrill of seducing a new woman worth $250,000 and 18 years of being in a legally mediated relationship with a bad person? No. Please save yourself a lot of hardship by having some damn standards gentlemen!

You might be thinking…

Wow, Jonathan, you’re super judgmental of women!

Well, I also encourage women to be judgmental of men; having hard standards with the kinds of behavior they would accept from men that they allow into their lives and bodies. 

Someone might also point out…

Jonathan, you’re a slut-maker! It takes two to tango. Your behavior and the behavior of men like you enable the bad behavior of women.

I could argue, I’ve just enjoyed the decline. If it wasn’t me sleeping with these sluts it would be someone else. I just adapted my behavior to what worked. Before my promiscuous phase that lasted about 10 years, I spent about five years trying to do it the old-fashioned way, trying to find a nice Christian girl to wife up and it really didn’t work. Women are ultimately the gatekeepers to sex and they have a little more responsibility for the degenerate state of things than men do. One of the first conversations I had with my now wife was about the word womanizer, women almost always know when they are dealing with a womanizer, it’s painfully obvious but they often succumb anyways. Just listen to that classic Britney Spears song if you need further convincing that they are utterly complicit in their own womanizing.

And actually, I think I was perhaps a cut above the stereotypical womanizer because I always tried to leave every woman better than I found her. I ejaculated into their minds a bit of my passion for health, libertarianism, entrepreneurship, or personal development.

If you enjoyed these five stories from my inglorious past with women, I share a sixth, The non-consensual kicker, in the second chapter of my book for men, Don't Stick Your Dick in a Blender: How to meet a nice girl instead - from a tantric husband with a better sex life than you!

Don't Stick Your Dick in a Blender

 

5.0

Category: Book

Finding a good woman

After hearing my stories and countless others like them, it might be easy to adopt another bias, that all women are bad and that’s also false. I Was Promised a Sex Slave will delve more deeply into how to find a woman who might just be good enough to give your last name to, but I’ll make a few points…

• Clearly, my environment had everything to do with the kinds of women I was dating. If my wife was ever abducted by aliens I wouldn’t go back to those crazy clubs I used to hang out in to find a replacement, I’d go to salsa clubs, I’d go to yoga classes, I’d do daygame, heck, I might even go to church!
• Intoxication had a lot to do with my lack of standards in the past. When you drink, even a little bit, your standards go out the window. If you’re always drinking when you hang out with the woman you’re dating that’s a bad sign.
• Your friends and family should be vetting the people you’re dating. If your loved ones actually care about you, they’ll scrutinize your lovers a bit and ask you some hard questions.
• Many of my friends had similarly rowdy sex lives but they were quite lazy about using condoms and many of them paid a very high cost that ultimately limited their freedom and fun. That millimeter of plastic allowed me to play with fire without inflaming my entire life in disaster.

After I had casually dated my now-wife for a while, I admitted to her that I was a bit of a commitment-phobe. I wasn't a one-woman kind of guy, and I suggested a bit of a double standard: she probably wouldn’t want to play the field, but I might and if I did I would be careful to make sure it never caused her any drama. An indecent proposal she staunchly refused, unlike other girls I’d been with.
This was my impetus to reconsider my priorities and aims in life. I took a bit of a wait-and-see stance, if I felt driven to try to hook up with other women on the side, then I break things off with her and do so. But if I was quite satisfied and managed to keep it in my pants then I’d give this monogamy thing a shot. A year later, I was having the best sex of my life, and my appetite for promiscuity was gone. I was also a lot more focused on the meaningful things in life; being productive in my work and writing, going to the gym, doing my meditation, reading good books, investing in gold, and staying in touch with my family.
If you’ve been dating a woman for a little while I’ll suggest that instead of having the talk — asking "Do you want to be my girlfriend ?"— you test her by proposing to her the double standard that I did. If she’s a principled woman she’ll categorically reject it and you know that she’s actually girlfriend or wifey material. If she accepts it, don’t get too excited; eventually, she will want equal rights in your monogamish arrangement and will make you a cuck, that’s certainly not what you want is it? Take it as your sign to move on to find a woman who values loyalty and fidelity.

There’s a line from the classic movie The Man in the Iron Mask, that the noble musketeer, D’Artagnan tells King Louis XIV…

“I think it is possible for one man to love one woman all his life and be the better for it.”

I loved this line and this movie is well worth a watch, it showcases old-school men of courage and conviction, but I really haven’t lived up to it. D’Artagnan is telling the promiscuous young king that he can devote his life to one woman and be a better man for it.
This is a half-truth, a padawan on the personal development path of seduction will have so much more opportunity to grow if they resist their provider instincts to settle down with one woman. Don’t let the mainstream relationship gurus confuse you, being a single man dating and seducing different women is more challenging than being in a relationship. Being in a relationship is comfortable, in fact, it’s so comfortable that the real challenge is resisting the tendency towards mediocrity and getting lazy about the personal habits that made you attractive enough in the first place. But after years, in my case at least a decade, as a single seducer you run into a glass ceiling of personal growth in that paradigm.

Before I got married we met with a very happy conversative couple that had been married for some time. We told them that we were getting married and the wife asked me a hard question...

"Jonathan I know that you’ve had a past with a lot of women. Do you really think you can settle down with just one woman after that?"

I responded that at this point in life, I saw more opportunity for variety, novelty, and adventure in one woman than I did in many women. Women, especially the kinds of cute young women that you’ll meet at clubs, parties, or even an artisanal coffee shop are quite cookie-cutter; give me five minutes with a 20 to 30-year-old attractive woman and I can predict with almost total accuracy what her personality is going to be like, what she’s going to say, and what she’s going to be into (pets, astrology, tasty food, and silly TV shows). She may look different than other girls but the experience of seducing her will be very predictable. After 10 years of that, I got a little bored. They are simply the less individually differentiated sex and there’s nothing wrong with that! Now I can sit down with my woman and watch a documentary about some intellectual subject that interests me and we’ll have a stimulating discussion about it or I’ll read to her about some health or sex hack that I want to try and we’ll do it together. Picking up yet another cute but kind-of-dumb girl at a club or doing daygame and having that same silly first-date conversation over and over again pales in comparison to this next-level paradigm of seduction, novelty, and growth.

Also, in the past I’ve been very critical of love; I mostly think of it as a very silly, intoxicating emotion that often drives people to be selfish. And the word itself is a radical oversimplification of a deep human drive that, like the force in Star Wars, can be used for good or for evil. But, maybe for the first time in my life, I really have fallen in love and it’s a beautiful thing. I’ve never loved or been loved like this before. And it’s well worth the decade spent walking that precipitous, fiery path.

Seduction doesn’t end at the altar, there’s a long game to be played which is just as rich and enjoyable.

To Summarize

• Seduction can be a powerful tool for personal growth.
• If there’s a chance that you can kiss a girl, go for it!
• Be aware of cultural nuances and standards, they can make or break you.
• Have hard standards in your dating.
• If you don’t think that she’d make a good mother or wife, use a condom dammit!
• There are three major red flags; smoking, drinking to excess, and being a single mother. If there’s one of these flags, proceed with caution and use a condom! More than one of these red flags should totally disqualify a woman — there are three billion women on the planet, find a better one.
• Don’t stick your dick in crazy.

From my book How to Be Cross Eyed: Thriving Despite Your Physical Imperfection — a mémoire and lifehacking manifesto

How to Be Cross Eyed

 

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