Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Lessons from the PUA movement. Part 1

A lot has been said about the PUA movement being a scam and so forth. I just thought of this quick blog post in my struggle to start dating again, and also the struggle to go after the types I really want to date, instead of just settling for what I settled for previously (or what other people often settle for). So this blog post isn't really an analysis of what PUA is, or my opinions of it, its just a reflection of what I really learned from the movement, and how I find it relevant with my life. The first thing is, a lot of what I had been conditioned to think about dating growing up was totally wrong. It wasn't clear, but what a lot of people told me (and maybe not always what they were trying to get across, but how I interpreted) is that I should just "wait" and a woman would come along and be my girlfriend if I "stopped looking". Now when I was a teenager, maybe not worrying about getting a girlfriend may not always had been a bad thing, but by the time I was in my twenties, it was getting to a point where something HAD to be done. Its perfectly fine not being with someone, but if one goes that long without companionship, its abnormal, and I dare say, not really human. So this was one myth that I was raised with by family members, sometimes friends, and it was erroneous. Another thing that was subconsciously communicated by how I grew up is once you sleep with someone, you must have a relationship with them. Now I think this may be even worse than the previous myth. Thousands of broken pieces of property, divorce settlements, alimony, and child support cases are the result of this kind of thinking. For one, its good to be safe obviously while "sleeping around" but if we go into this type of thinking applied across the board, in other words, serial monogamy, it becomes a sickness in how it can perpetuate very emotionally unhealthy lifestyles. So its with these myths along with having general mental health issues, along with being an outcast, I was a virgin until my mid-twenties. Friends and family started to intervene because there were other girls that they knew that also wanted companionship, and finally mustering up the courage (with some near misses along the way), I had girlfriends. I was still stuck in this trap though, because I continued to lust after the same girls (or so I thought) years after we had broken up. I was stuck in a perpetual state of what the puas call "one-itis", being stuck on girls just because I thought I was stuck with them only. It took me reading Neil Strauss's the Game to really realize the error of my thinking. Even if one doesn't follow the PUA prescription of being with as many girls as possible, its the idea of scarcity vs abundance, that dating is a numbers game, and that one should date as much as possible before settling down that stuck with me. Also the idea that one SHOULD in some ways develop dating as a "skill" that being attractive to women can cross over to other parts of life as a general phase of self-improvement, all these might have, dare I say, saved my life. I am not done with my self-improvement journey, I have had some derailments along the way, and its taken me some time to bounce back from certain things. But I do credit a lot of this maligned subculture for giving me the push to make the journey. I prefer relationships and monogamy, but never again will I believe that I should be with someone because I am deserving of noone better, or that its "wrong" to date around.