[ad_1]
Dear Dr NerdLove
A while back after turning 18, I became extremely self conscious of the fact that I was a complete and utter virgin beta loser. I was skinny fat, unassertive, unattractive and I coped with this by using porn to dull my testosterone and video games to distract myself from reality.
Eventually though, I seemed to have snapped out of that; and In my pain I changed my life: I meditate for up-to an hour a day regularly; I’m well on my way to earning 5K this month through a business. I have an excellent sense in streetwear and have put my own spin on it. I just ran my first marathon. I’ve logged 20 minutes this entire month on my steam account. I haven’t eaten anything with sugar in it for over 6 months. I’ve exercised and dieted down to about 8% body fat; with visible abs and a resultant cut jawline and facial features. I’ve even fixed my hair and made it look good. I’ve gone from averaging a 6 to about an 8.5 (photo-feeler) and There has been a huge shift in the way that people treat me (going far towards fueling my misanthropy).
Despite all of these achievements for which I am grateful; I still can’t get fucking laid for the life of me. I find myself actively going out of my way to self sabotage any chance I get as if it’s completely involuntary. It is as if my brain cannot comprehend that a girl could 1) possibly like me and 2) not be 400lbs overweight and that these aren’t mutually exclusive options.
At this point it’s fucking comedic how much I actively suck at what should be easy; none of my friends think I even have issues with girls, most chicks think I’m dating someone; people just assume I get laid.
And yet somehow even when 5 different girls ASK ME OUT; my brain seems to find a way to sabotage.
It is as if my mind doesn’t allow me to both show interest in a woman and not be a performing clown as I do it.
Despite all of this, I try to reassure myself knowing that the hard work has been done; all that remains now is the unlearning of bad mental patterns from my less socially valuable days but progress here is very slow; if it happens at all. For one; while I don’t disagree with conventional red-pill advice about being masculine etc.; being a degenerate who lives on internet forums, circle jerking about how “alpha” he is as he scrapes Doritos dust off of his basement just seems unappealing to me. And all other mainstream men’s dating advice is just pathetic garbage either selling feminism or advice secretly packaged towards women (a-lot of these sites give up trying to find male clients interested in “negotiating” intercourse; who would’ve wondered).
I have been for a while and mostly just spun in place for a while now. My confidence still sucks; my flirting skills or whatever you call them are dog shit. And I still feel like a fucking loser.
It’s been going on for so long now that I often feel like it’l never end. I did the stuff they told me to do but nothing works. Meanwhile even people with birth deformities stunt on me. I am aware that it is a case of my brain not having what it needs to fix itself but I can’t on my own fix myself; It is my brain that was responsible for getting me here in the first place. I refuse to be mediocre and “get in touch with my inner-child” or whatever guys with high oestrogen do instead of taking action; whatever success I’ve got I got it by just downright suffering and doing things that I didn’t even know I could do; I had to suffer because if I didn’t I wouldn’t have deserved success.
But where I find now that most guys have a value problem (something like 80-90% of guys are unattractive to women on dating apps); I seem to have an impossible self image problem. It is as if my brain cannot allow me to succeed. Im still scared of rejection, still don’t have “game” or flirting skills, still borderline autistic with women and I still just don’t “get” it.
Hoping you can help me out,
Don’t Even Know Anymore
Alright, DENA, your letter actually pairs fairly well with Lonely and Confused’s letter from a couple weeks ago, as well as with Change My Mind’s dilemma of trying to let go of his Red Pill beliefs. So I’d suggest starting by reading some of those.
But I can tell you exactly where things are falling apart for you, why you’re struggling and what you need to do.
Right off the bat: you’ve made a lot of progress, and you should be proud of that. It takes a lot of work and discipline to make those transformations, and that’s to be commended. However – and you had to know that was coming – you’ve fallen into an incredibly common sticking point that a lot of people have: you put all your attention on your physical self and neglected your social and emotional self. To put it another way: you made Charisma and Wisdom your dump stats, and that’s working against you.
Here’s what’s going on: you, like a lot of people, especially younger people, looked at fixing your external self as the cure-all that would solve all your problems. It’s a very common outlook; “oh, if only I were X inches taller/ Y pounds lighter, all my problems would be fixed.” In fact, a lot of people in the incel community have gone so far as to spend the equivalent of a new car on getting plastic surgery in order to “fix” their perceived flaws, only to discover that their problems didn’t magically evaporate into the ether. In fact, if anything things became worse for them; here they were, finally rocking their “Chad” status and yet nobody cared, and nothing changed. Far from solving all their dating woes, it just made them even more bitter, more resentful and more convinced than ever before that women could detect their innate incel natures.
Now to be clear, it’s not that getting fit and working on your style and presentation isn’t worth your time and effort. It’s that until you work on underlying issues, you’ve made cosmetic changes, not substantive ones. It’s akin to putting new siding on a house and giving it a fresh coat of paint. It may have more curb appeal, but it didn’t fix any issues with the foundations or internal structure. So now that house’s got a lovely exterior but all the old problems, and if those don’t get addressed, those cosmetic, external changes don’t mean a damn thing.
Let’s start with the most obvious – you feel much better about your looks, but as you’ve discovered, looks aren’t everything. Feeling better about how you look doesn’t magically become confidence, any more than it turns into social skills. There is no person so hot that people are going to be able to ignore an unpleasant personality or having the social skills of a rock with a chip on its shoulder. Even if you have people approaching you, you need the social acumen to actually turn that initial interest into something more substantial. After all, early attraction is shallow attraction; it’s as people get to know us that they develop a deeper level of attraction and interest.
…which I guess would make it a gneiss guy, but I digress.
So a significant part of your problem is that while you put all the effort in changing your looks, you didn’t put a commensurate level of effort into working on your social skills. If someone comes up and starts talking to you – or you approach a sexy someone at a bar or hanging out at the bookstore – then you need to be able to woo them with your words, build chemistry and connections and, importantly, determine if the two of you are compatible. If you haven’t been working on things like small talk, being an engaging conversationalist and finding your flirting style, then you’re going to be at a significant disadvantage. The guy who knows how to make women laugh and smile, who brings that sense of fun and helps people enjoy themselves is going to be in higher demand than the guy who’s hot but distant or unpleasant.
The good news is that social skills are skills, and any skill can be improved with practice. The bad news is that there are no short cuts and no ways to practice those skills without going out and just putting them to use. If you want to improve your flirting, you have to go out and just flirt. This means that you’re going to have to lean into the suck and accept that you’re going to crash and burn while you’re in the pain period. You have to be willing to take those failures as part of the learning process and focus more on what you can learn from it than beating yourself up. The more you can see failures as something that teaches you what didn’t work and what you need to work on, the easier it’ll be to bounce back and improve.
Similarly, you’re going to want to put time into talking to everyone. Not just women – and especially not just women that you find attractive – but everyone. Old and young, rich and poor and in between… the more you can talk to anyone and find them interesting to talk to, the better you’ll do overall.
If you can focus on your social development with the same drive and energy that you applied to your physical development, you’ll sharpen those skills in no time.
But that’s not going to solve the problem. For that, you’re gonna have to start looking deeper inside. Remember what I said about how slapping some new siding and a coat of paint doesn’t fix problems with a house’s foundations or dry rot in the frames? Well, you’ve got some foundation problems my dude, and until you address those, any successes you have will be on borrowed time.
You have two significant problems that need addressing, and they’re entwined around each other like horny snakes. The first is that you haven’t changed how you see yourself. Yeah, you like how you look now, but you still see and address yourself with contempt. That needs to change. Despite what people will tell you, you can’t shame yourself into self-improvement, nor can you bully yourself into being a better person. You may make some changes, sure… but those changes are going to be transitory and temporary at best. Yelling at yourself to “stop being a beta virgin loser” means that whenever you reach a sticking point – getting shot down by someone you’re flirting with, for example – you’re going to backslide. A lot. Your brain is going to say “well, I’m still that beta virgin loser, so fuck everything” and then you start to lose all the progress you made.
Turns out having an inner drill instructor doesn’t actually work for making substantive, permanent positive changes. You know what works? Positive self-talk. Positive self reinforcement. Yeah, I know, this sounds like beta, low-T shit (more on this in a second)… but hey, if it’s good enough for the Navy SEALs, it’s good enough for you. A positive, friendly and optimistic attitude is what gives you emotional resiliency. It’s what makes you mentally and emotionally strong. And, importantly, it’s part of what makes people like you rather than tolerating you until they don’t have to.
Which is where the other problem comes in. That negative, contemptuous self-talk you indulge in? That’s the result of the contemptuous bullshit that you’ve absorbed and internalized and exhibit towards everyone else. You, my dude, are positively dripping of toxicity, from comments about degenerates, shit-talk about feminism and “high oestrogen”, and this, more than anything else, is going to sabotage your success and stunt your mental and emotional growth. You’ve been bathing in bullshit, from crabs-in-a-bucket mentality from incels to redpill bullshit being sold to you by redpill grifters who figured out that lonely, socially isolated men are the easiest marks. You’ve been sold a bill of goods by people who hold you in the same contempt you’ve been told to view “beta low-t losers”, who wouldn’t spare the piss if you were on fire unless they could get another fifty bucks a month from you. And the longer you soak in that biohazard stew of resentment, entitlement, the worse it’s going to get for you.
Trust me, I’ve been there and done that. I was there in the early days when they were still refining the formula, I’ve seen what it’s done to people and I am here from the future to tell you: until you pull out of it, this is as good as it’s going to get. Look around you. Look at the communities you spend time in, the people who you let into your life and the things you feed your brain. How many of your peers could you trust with your secrets? How many of them could you open up to and confess your deepest fears and emotional struggles without worrying they’re going to use them against you? Shit, how many of them could you trust with your wallet?
Here’s the thing about the “masculinity” you’ve been told to idolize: you’ve set yourself up in the most precarious of positions, where dominance and aggression are supposed to be virtues. Which hey, cool, hope you realize that this means that you will forever be unable to let your guard down or relax before someone else decides to take this opportunity to slide the knife in. The way you talk about the supposed betas? This is how your community talks about you; any respect they give is both temporary and conditional. The first sign of being human will be seen as a sign of weakness and it’s all downhill from there.
Similarly, the women you want to date? They’ll see that contempt radiating off of you like a passive-aggressive Pripyat Ferris wheel attendant. No woman worth dating is going to want to spend any time with a dude who sees other people as “low-t cucks”, and you’re not gonna like the ones who do. All this does is tell them how you see them, too. That dominance and aggression that Dollar Store Tom Hardys preach? This tells women that when things get rough, the line you see between “dominance” and “out-and-out-violence” gets blurry indeed. And the folks who were most indoctrinated into those mindsets are the most miserable of all.
You know what women actually like? They like the intersection of strength, gentleness and kindness, the un-self-consciousness of authenticity and joy, the emotional maturity to have passion and compassion. And when we talk about the intersection of strength and gentleness, we aren’t talking about physical strength. If you aren’t able to have compassion and empathy, joy and passion and a willingness to not give a shit about other people’s faux-manhood bullshit, then you aren’t strong, you’re brittle as overheated steel.
So talking about “low value”? Using “autistic” as an adjective – and a negative one at that? Buying into the bullshit alpha/beta divide and treating it like a real thing? You need to ditch all of it. Just as importantly, you need to pull out of all the redpill, PUA and incel communities you’re soaking in. The longer you stay part of them, the more you’ll lose any progress you’ve made. The more you can get out into the real world and interact with people as they actually are instead of what other chuds imagine, the faster you’ll find your social life improves. You want to embrace your best self, instead of trying to measure up to the Potemkin village of your current peers’ subreddit selves – especially considering how little trust and community you have. You want friends and community who bring out your best self, who are there for you when things are bad and will support you instead of looking for the best opportunity to slide the knife in.
And until you do that? You’re going to have the same voice dripping poison in your ear, telling you that you’re not good enough. You’re going to have the same problems attracting women worth dating and keeping them around. You’re going to continue to be lonely and bitter and wondering why nothing seems to be working. Because none of it is going to work until you get rid of the canker that’s been growing on your heart and encouraged by people who see you as a marketing opportunity instead of a person.
There’s a better, brighter world out there waiting for you. There’s a happier, more satisfying life, with fulfillment, community and satisfaction that’s ready for you, if you just reach out and take it. But that can’t happen until you let go of the bitterness and resentment and open yourself up to joy and hope.
I know this sounds harsh, but I’m rooting for you, man. I want you to be better. And I know you can be happier. You just have to choose to take that first step, and you’ll be on your way.
Good luck.
[ad_2]
www.doctornerdlove.com
