The indirect opener. Negging the target. Spiking DHV’s. It all seemed so different. So new. Maybe that’s what drew me to PUA. What I had been doing clearly wasn’t working, so maybe trying something totally different, albeit unusual, would lead to success with women. How could I argue with the success of guys like Mystery, or Neil Strauss (a.k.a Style), especially considering the success of his book The Game?

Talk of underground lairs and nicknames gave PUA a sense of camaraderie amongst guys like me who needed to be filled in to what they missed about girls growing up.

This all fit in with my illusions: That women can be ‘gamed’ into feeling attraction to a man, that a man should hide (at least at first) his physical attraction to a woman, that he can go ‘under the radar’… It was so different that I expected a different, better result.

I resented guys that had success with women. They seemed so cocky and arrogant. I wondered what women saw in these guys. Didn’t I deserve these women? After all, I had followed the rules and respected them. Why did I have to be the one absent of intimacy?

Although it pains me to admit it, I began to feel my perception of women become bitter and jaded. After years of rejection and disappointment, I felt like I was falling behind on a giant standardized test. I felt helpless. Depressed. It all felt like a cruel joke. “They just want a bad boy who treats them like shit.” That was how I really felt. And I was so desperate to change, that I was almost ready to provide that behavior. Almost. Almost ready to take out all my frustration, which was in reality about my own shortcomings, on the very women I hoped to attract. It was good for this frustration to finally come out, but it was sorely misdirected.

It is painfully obvious to me now that my entitled attitude about “deserving” attraction is the same as a lazy worker’s entitled attitude that he deserves the same pay raise as his hard-working counterpart. I give thanks to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged for showing me that relationships follow some of the same maxims as work. I’m not entitled to any woman’s feelings of attraction. It must be mutual. This was a harsh, but needed, wake up call. What I was missing was attraction, not kindness. And they are separate.

Back to the story: I read The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists by Neil Straus, The Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want by Richard LaRuina and The Mystery Method: How To Get Beautiful Women Into Bed by Mystery (Erik von Markovik). I delved into PUA and tried to make some approaches. The methodology of it appealed to my cerebral nature.

One day my buddies and I had a little PUA crusade on a beach. We opened 6 or 7 “sets” and hung around a few girls for the day. It made us feel macho. We used indirect openers (mine was the Dirty Dancing opener: “Hey, we were having a debate before, do you think Dirty Dancing is a chick flick?”). Yes, it started a conversation, but I later came down from my high and began to challenge my beliefs again when my success continued to stall. The one phone number I got that day was a flake and I failed miserably trying to conduct Style’s Evolution Phase-Shift comfort building routine. Something was still wrong.

But for once I had a new perspective: I referred to myself as a mere chip involved in a board game. I was entirely disassociated from my emotions; after all I was just playing a game, right? Nothing bad can happen if it’s all just a game. My player (not me) can get sent back to the start…but I can’t get hurt. Although it actually is great to be okay with rejection and not to put women on these golden pedestals, making a video game out of approaching is no mindset to actually connect with a woman. Once you feel that you actually have value to offer a woman, and that her beauty alone does not make her a goddess, it becomes obvious that no games are needed. You’re just a man seeking a compatible woman. Natural.

Style has a book out called Rules of the Game, which basically covers the how-to of the techniques used in his book The Game. Inside is a sort of mock cautionary page, telling readers that if they delve into the book that they’ll never be the same. It’s probably there to give readers the idea that the material in their hands is so powerful that it’s going to drastically change their lives. I actually read the warning and started thinking. I thought about these silly games I’d be playing with girls and how the material didn’t feel like the real me. I returned the book. No joke. I didn’t do the exercises and I didn’t learn the routines (except for one I learned online). I returned the book to the store.

This is part one of at least a two part series about PUA. Next time I’ll sum up some pros and cons of PUA and tell you what lessons I learned. I do feel that I learned something from trying it, so it wasn't all bad. In fact, some guys can benefit from it, but not for the reasons you may expect. I'll explain why.