What was the point in it all if you can't remember them?
I gave Mike grief because he forgot the weekend by Wednesday,
“What’s the point if you can’t remember the girl?” I ask the question, but it’s really a jab covering up a cope.
“What, like your stupid checklist?” I'm not sure if he was insulting my O.C.D. or that picking up women turned into my nerd hobby instead of the fun that it was.
Mike got laid, he didn't care.
He slept with twice as many women as I did but I convinced myself there was a difference. He was a sloppy degenerate; I was having harmless fun. I remembered every single girl. That made me a better man, I assumed. It didn't make me better at picking up women which was the game we were actually playing. It made me a better man in that vague, fungible sort of way that I couldn't explain but felt in my bones. I was playing Calvinball, and if the rules weren't working I made up new ones and it felt good.
The routine was standard and the routine was simple. We had practiced it hundreds of times. I walk up to one or two girls, never more than three. I tell them I've to leave in a minute. This is key as bar girls hate how often lame guys monopolize their time to talk about sports or some other nonsense she couldn't care less about, and you're implying you're not one of those guys for a refreshing change.
'I'm having an argument with Mike and need an impartial judge.' Bar girls love to be the sexual King Solomon and pass judgement. I end off with a sexually charged and polarizing question.
It's all Game, which is all a game. Women go out at night to get drunk, have fun, and, most importantly, to feel the good feelings. Nothing feels the same way to a woman that a sexually-polarized opinion does from a non-threatening good looking guy. It doesn't matter if she agrees with you. The feeling doesn't have to be positive or negative or moral or immoral or plausible or even honest. The feeling only has to be strong. So I ask the question, adding banter for a minute or two. We have a few laughs. I leave. I allow some time for the interest in me to breathe. Mike and I return a few minutes later. Now I am that guy she knew from before and not the stranger who may try to monopolize her time. For the next half hour we play around with small talk and body language with light flirting touches while building rapport. Mike was talking to her friend. The girls were coming home with us that night. Then my target cuts me off right in the middle of my routine. Girls know this is a game and go with it and they don't usually break character like this:
"You don't remember me, do you Rian?"
"No, should I?"
"I should hope so, you were inside me!"
“Wait, really?”
“You had a beret by your bed, next to some Asian vase.”
Damn, she was definitely in there; apparently I was as well.
I memorized the names, faces and body of every girl I had ever slept with; she was clearly mistaken. She describes my bedroom. She wasn't mistaken. To my ego this was Darth Vader saying he was my father.
Back this up...
What am I doing? I'm practicing pick up. I'm learning to sleep with women faster and more often. Why? Because I enjoy the warmth of a woman over the cold palm of my hand. I was a sailor for the Royal Canadian Navy and my damned ship took me away from home for half the year. That grey coloured bitch, she split up my home life into discrete monthly chunks for maximum life disruption. My hand was quick and convenient and a coping mechanism for my sailing schedule. Women were a frustrating dance where it seemed that any small slip up, any less than perfectly played game would ruin the night and send me home with nothing. I kept playing the same game over and over and over and the rules seemed arbitrary and complicated and unwinnable with no time to play it. Still, I am a man; the Queen mandated it.
I prefer women to my hand, difficulty be damned.
The Royal Canadian Navy made for an impossible dating life. It was a Sisyphean task where I had failure after failure after failure after failure. I lacked the self-awareness to see the problems let alone understand what I had to do to improve. I would spend precious hours, of which my job offered few, building rapport with a girl, setting up a date with a girl, talking to a girl about her job I didn't care about, building a friendship with a girl that I was told would blossom into a wonderful relationship. I would ask a girl out. I would pay to go see a movie with her, have a fun night with and drop romantic lines:
"Hey, Susan! This was fun, we should do this again next month!"
This works as well as it sounds. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. If that were true most women I met were quite fond of me. Sweet nothings. Well, definitely nothings. I reached a point where I had to make a choice. Either I would accept this repeated failure as the norm or I would make a change. I could learn why this part of the human condition seemed so difficult to an otherwise put-together man and fit it in a hectic work schedule, or I could accept my lot in life and go my own way. Maybe eventually a girl would fall into my lap.
I chose sex.
I found my way into a space on the internet with guys who did this semi-professionally. Yes, it turns out that there were guys out there who slept with women as their business model. It was a cross between the playboys of the 1960's, jetsetters of the 1970's and nerd culture of the 1990's. This really appealed to guys like me in the millennial generation. I chose to learn how to be social, charismatic, charming and seductive in a systematized categorization of scripted routines wrapped up in a thin veneer of social science. Those were the skills guys like me, raised in the Nintendo generation, were good at. Childhoods built on the 8-bit era. Games were about memorization, constant failure, frustration, and iterative improvement. Strategy guides and practice. Game, used as a shorthand term for the process, was a game. Game was game. Through that gamification of my love life, a love life was possible.
The rules were simple: be attractive, don't be unattractive. The rest of the game involved detailed mental models, concepts, and routines. Learn the routines then adapt them to your own life. Complex, yet simple.
I began to make Game a game, so it follows that I would keep score. That's what you do with a game, you keep score. I got better at the game and my score improved. My score mattered more than the women. It was good in that I stopped putting women on pedestals, good that they were no longer unattainable unicorn treasures. The chase mattered more. Practice mattered more. The girl in front of me was the ball, not the game. I was becoming an artist and every girl was a canvas. Remembering each and every girl in that mental list was my way of thinking myself above it all. Lots of sleazy guys slept with all kinds of women, but I was a better person because I remembered. That all went away once I first met this girl I already slept with.
Sara from the Boom Boom Room? Meet Rian.
What was the point of my score if I couldn't remember? I had become Mike. I became what I mocked, the thing I was above. I was no longer the better man I told myself I was. How long had it been since I started lying to myself? Were there others? How many others? My routine that night changed. I was more interested in hearing how Sara slept with me than being just another practice session. I was fascinated by her story. I wondered if anyone else wanted to hear it.
I guess I'll find out.
I had built her up as something different, something special. She was there to give me a field report on how I did and I loved every second of it. I wonder if she was really that unmemorable or if I had just been drinking? Afterwards I brought her home and slept with her again.
She fooled me twice, shame on me.
Her cab was going to be another twenty minutes, just enough time for pillow talk. What could I do with this looming existential crisis but laugh and ask more questions?
"Last time you got up, looked at me then ran to the bathroom to throw up!"
"Yeah, I guess I was hung over that morning."
"Oh good, I thought it had something to do with me!"
Typical woman. I could be sick as a dog and she had to make it about her.
She giggled.
I put her in the cab and reflected. What I came up with was unexpected …
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