The pattern I can't ignore
I've noticed a disturbing pattern in my dating life. When I got the best results dating, including when I met my ex-wife and in the year or two before her when I was with many beautiful women, I was at the worst version of myself. I was utterly self-centered, utterly focused on getting what I wanted, with very little empathy for anyone else. It was all about me and very little consideration for the woman. At the same time, while certainly not every woman was very interested in me, if I did manage to get a first date with a woman, there was a very high percentage of closing the date and getting laid. Often it was the first date, definitely the second, third, fourth, or sixth date at most.
I noticed that some of the women might have preferred a nicer guy, and I had no qualms about pushing them away. Oh, you want to wait until marriage? Absolutely not. I'm not wasting my time with you. I was ruthless about it: if I'm not going to get laid here, and if you're not going to have fun with me and do what I want, I have no time for you.
Amazingly, I seemed to consistently attract women who found me very attractive even though I was overweight. On the surface, you would think this guy is a jerk. I was unhealthy. I was drinking a lot of alcohol, like a gallon of liquor a week, drinking 20 to 40 hours a week, and then often having a hangover. My diet was crap. And yet women often, at least from what I remember, had a very strong attraction to me, to the point where they would throw out boundaries they'd had with other guys and just throw themselves at me. That's what happened with my ex. I was married, we had kids, and we were together 15 years.
Getting sober changed the dynamic
When I got sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, I got tired of my drinking, and it seemed like as long as I was this self-centered person lacking empathy, I didn't like myself. Of course, in getting sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, I faced this dark side of myself, this monster that my wife had fallen in love with. I decided I didn't want to be like that anymore. I wanted to be the love in the life. I wanted to be the light and the joy. I didn't want to be the reason my wife said she was upset all the time. But then when she wasn't upset, she was often very turned on.
I remember one day in the kitchen when I was a couple of years sober and my wife was making me wrong for something. Her underlying assumption was that I was just this monster who could go off at any time. She was future tripping and having an argument all based on the idea that I'm this awful person. I asked her, why do you have that idea? I'm not acting like that anymore, and your idea doesn't fit reality anymore. It certainly did when we were dating and in the first few years, but I had made this huge change. From what I can tell, that change actually killed a significant portion of the attraction in our relationship.
It went to the point where last year I decided I wanted to do everything I could to be the most loving person. I wasn't going to create content online because that's a devil worshiping system. I was going to be love and light. I was going to help people. And then my now ex-wife demanded a divorce, right when I felt like I was hitting this new level of being a loving, light being.
A year of dating with an open heart
Then I started trying to date from this point of view that I'm so open-hearted. I love women. I love spending time with women. I want to help a woman have all her dreams come true with me. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars dating this year, from matchmaking to dating apps to meeting women in person and through friends. I've gone out with at least 25 women this year, more than 50 dates or so. I paid for everything on all the dates, and zero results. Zero.
That kind of so-called failure would have been unthinkable in my twenties. Back then I got laid with at least a third of the women I went out with. So I'm asking, what is happening? Why is it that when I open my heart, the woman texts me that she's not feeling the connection, that she just doesn't feel that spark, that she needs to feel that? Or she says, I could be friends with you, but I don't want to date you. No woman ever told me she wanted to be my friend when I was acting like a self-centered jerk.
The decision I made in high school
I remember in high school the first time that happened. I was such a loving guy, just being very friendly, and I tried to kiss one of my girl friends. She just wanted to be my friend. I realized after that I couldn't just be this. I saw all these guys who to me looked like jerks, and they were dating all the women I wanted to date. I remember consciously deciding: you can't be a nice guy. If you want to get these women, you are going to have to start being a jerk. There was quite a learning curve because it felt a bit unnatural. Wait a minute, this is who I have to be? It was quite a learning process. But over a few years, I eventually mastered it.
When I started dating my now ex-wife, we listened to the music I wanted to listen to. I don't ever remember asking her what music she liked or what music she wanted to hear. We went places I wanted to go. We did things I wanted to do. If she brought up anything I didn't agree with, I would argue with her until she got silent and full of rage. If she brought it up again, I would go right back to arguing, and I would use any means I could verbally to win the argument.
At the time I met her, I was watching adult movies every day, morning and evening, sometimes in the middle of the day. I was also listening to what I would call devil worshiping music. I'm not going to name anybody in particular, but when you know it's there, you'll see it all over the place. I was playing video games like Call of Duty, first-person shooters, spending tens of hours every week, 10, 20, 30 hours of my week playing first-person shooter games. My mind was consistently in very dark places, and then I was poisoning my body with alcohol and eating all this processed food. My mind often was very toxic.
This is the man in the longest relationship I've had. This was a woman most guys would have loved to be with: a beautiful woman, really sweet, and professionally successful, just a top-tier woman. And she falls in love with me, a guy who was consumed by the devil, you could say, who wanted to have love and light but spent most of his life in negative, self-centered environments.
Before my ex-wife, I had a bunch of similar dating situations where really sweet women would just fall in love with me and want to be with me. I made sure to try and hide some of this stuff, because that's the deception. But the energy I was putting off drew women to me. The way I interacted with women was very straightforward too. I would just ask women out. I didn't care about getting rejected because I figured it was their loss if they didn't want me. I would ask women out everywhere, all the time, at the grocery store checkout. I was only thinking about how to get as many dates as possible, as many women as possible. There was no consideration of whether maybe this woman has a boyfriend or something. I was just asking every woman I could out. I'd go through my phone and text all the women.
Losing faith in the loving approach
Now I'm thinking I might need to go back to being a guy who is selfish and self-centered in the extreme, because I've lost any faith that acting as a loving, kind guy with an open heart is going to work for me to meet a woman. Maybe that's me feeling defeated and rejected. But at the same time, what I've seen over the last year has been brutal. For example, some people say I have very loving, kind eyes that look deep into your soul. And I've had some women tell me to my face, why are you looking at me like that? It's creepy. Women didn't say that when I had these kind of dead, devil worshiping eyes.
In fact, I heard Owen Cook, who has had a lot of experience with this, say that in his experience, that's often what he saw: guys who were just dead inside, and women would, not every woman, but he saw many examples where a beautiful woman who could have any guy would throw herself at a guy who was consumed with evil and self-hatred and just miserable. Now obviously there are all kinds of different people. And obviously this dynamic is not men/women specific either. I imagine the same dynamics could show up in lesbian, gay, all kinds of different arrangements.
Maybe I'm not looking for the right women. I've been noticing that a lot of the women I've been going out with feel like going out with me 15 years ago. Maybe I'm just not the one. Maybe there needs to be one person in a relationship who is utterly self-centered, and the other one needs to be the selfless one. Maybe I'm just not good at being the selfless one, because that certainly felt unnatural. The relationship with my ex-wife felt pretty natural until I said, hey, I want to try being the one who's considerate and loving, where everything bad is not my fault. I'd like to try that. And that dynamic didn't work very well for us.
If I have to be one role or the other in a relationship, I have to say I'd rather be the selfish one, where it's all about me getting what I want. That's disappointing to me, because I love the idea of being with a woman and making sure all her dreams come true and doing everything for her. I love the idea of being in an equal partnership where we're both working together, nobody has to be the selfish jerk, and nobody has to be the victim getting exploited by the other one.
Open hearts close fast
I've noticed it gets even weirder when I show up with an open heart. I went out with one woman, and my heart was so open and loving that she said something about disciplining kids that immediately made me sad, made my heart close, and made me not want to be around her anymore. I think back, and if I had been in that self-centered energy, I wouldn't have cared what she said about disciplining kids, because my only thought would have been that I'm here to get laid. I'll listen to whatever she has to say, and none of it means that much to me, because I'm here to get laid. That's how I used to go on dates, and it used to work consistently.
Now I go on dates really listening to women and connecting, and I get ghosted. I went on what to me was a great date with a woman, and after she said she had a great time with me, I asked her for another date, and she ghosted me. Wow. We went to the place she wanted to go to. She seemed like she had so much fun at the time. Ghosted. What? I just want to know what to do. I just want to know what works to get results.
What the selfish version got me
I'm sad to see that the results I got when I was a selfish, self-centered-in-the-extreme man were results that got beautiful women to fall in love with me. It also got some women to not like me at all, but they didn't waste my time. It got me to quickly push away women who weren't right for me. And it got me a woman who loved me and had kids with me for 15 years. If I had kept staying that way, we might have been able to stay together. If I had been able to just be sober and keep acting like that, we might have had a happier marriage than we did when I decided to try to be this nice, loving, open-hearted, kind guy.
The only question is, can I go around utterly self-centered, only focused on getting what I want, lacking empathy for other people, and feel good about myself? Because before, I couldn't feel good about myself. But you know what? I don't feel good about myself now either, with every woman I go out with either rejecting me because the connection isn't there and all that stuff, or me being too open-hearted to deal with her. I didn't care about red flags before. To me, the only question was whether this woman was going to do what I wanted or not. I didn't care what kind of crazy stuff she said. The crazier the stuff she said, the more entertaining it was to me, and I'd just think, whatever. I had women share the craziest stuff about guys they'd dated and things they'd been through, and my response was, all right, so when are we going to get in bed?
I've been cleaning up. I cleaned up what I listen to, all my music, and I stopped watching adult movies. And now I'm wondering whether it might be time to go back and listen to that same music and go back to watching adult movies every day, to go back to what worked before, at least at this point, just to test it.
Watching a friend choose the man I used to be
For example, I have this friend who has been a great friend to me. But then she chooses the men she chooses, and they perfectly fit the description of who I used to be, of what Owen Cook was talking about. I just walk away disgusted. I know how to be like that. I can hardly stand it, and I don't want to be friends with her when I see the men she's choosing. That's how some of the people in my ex-wife's life looked at me: why are you choosing this overweight, self-centered jerk who only wants to play video games and drink all day? But she didn't even tell them. At first I made sure to hide that from her, and then even when she saw it, she would hide it. She wouldn't go around telling her friends what I was actually acting like. It's crazy.
I hope there is another way
So I don't know. I think it's pretty clear I'm not getting results being loving and nice and kind. I'm not getting results being considerate. What I am getting is my feelings hurt. I'm getting obsessed with women who are not interested in me. I'm spending a bunch of money and not getting laid. I'm trying so hard and absolutely failing more than I've ever failed at dating in my whole life. This is so bad.
What I really hope is that there's another way to look at this. I hope there is a way to be a loving, nice man and attract a woman who appreciates that, and who is not just going to fill that other role herself. Looking back over everything I've shared this year in my Dating playlist, it leaves me pretty hopeless about dating sometimes. Is this what I need to do to find another woman like before? Do I need to go back to how I was before?
So, I hope there's another way.