On Rejection

I keep meaning to write in this blog, but I keep putting it off because of the time and focus commitment.  I'm thinking I should go back to video blogs, which were much easier to make because all I had to do was ramble in front of a camera for however long.  Just need to free up a lot of the storage on my phone.

Rejection is a subject that has risen to the top of the lists this year especially, and has been the key challenge I have faced especially when it comes to meeting and dating women.  This hasn't just been the case with pickup, but this has been the case across the board.

To put it bluntly, I don't deal with rejection very well - at least not with women.  I don't think I ever handled it well.  Even as a kid, I hated the idea of going over to a friends' house and knocking on the door to ask if so-and-so is there, fearing that said friend wasn't there or couldn't come out to play, etc. and have the door slammed on my face or feel embarrassed for some reason.  I even feared going up to the counter at a store to ask for something as simple as a refill on a drink (this was back when most places you had to ask for a refill at the counter and only a handful had the self-serve fountain drinks).  Maybe it was because I was told no one time harshly or because I was afraid of people who worked somewhere because I was a little kid, or whatever.  I remember having to get my mom, dad or sister to come up to the counter with me whenever I wanted something.

Now obviously I don't have these sort of anxiety issues today, but with women it's still a major issue.  I think it's an issue for this reason - women reject guys, and guys who put themselves out there risk the chance of getting shot down hard.  When I was in elementary and middle school, I never asked any girl out.  I really wasn't in any position to date anyways, but I thought the ridicule would have been too great if I got shot down and I wouldn't have been able to live with the embarrassment.  What I would do was obsess over one girl every year, thinking it would be nice to go out with that girl but not doing so - not because of the fear of rejection but because of what ridicule I would face if I did get involved.  News travels fast, and I wasn't exactly the most popular kid in school.  In high school, things did get a tad bit better, but it was still more of the same obsessing over one girl a year.  In fact, this whole obsessing over one girl a year didn't stop until just five years ago, when I started learning pickup.  I learned how bad oneitis is, and I will give pickup credit for helping me rid myself of that.  However, I think one of the reasons why I had the oneitis in the first place was because I thought the girl was the best match at the time and yet I still didn't want to screw things up.

Pickup didn't make my fear of rejection go away.  It may have subdued it a little.  It may have allowed me to take more risks.  But the truth of the matter is it in some ways made things worse.  See when it comes to rejection, pickup companies are not clear on what they want to teach men and many times just outright contradict their own advice.  I would say just about all of them have no problems giving a long ass speech about how guys should not fear rejection but should embrace it, take it on, just get as many rejections as possible because that's how you learn not to care, etc.  However, once that speech is over, then they'll get into tactics, strategies, gimmicks, etc. on what body language you should convey, what you should be doing while you're out, what you should say to a girl when you approach her, how you should go about asking for the number, etc. and the more mainstream pickup groups will even go as far as telling you that you can switch on attraction triggers with any girl and if you don't then you executed step 2-B wrong or some bullshit like that.  I know it's all to sell overpriced ebooks and videos and even more overpriced bootcamps, because if you just tell guys to be themselves and stop looking to women for approval and screen girls out, they wouldn't be in business.  This idea of "ploughing through" has never worked.  Sure, maybe a girl might not be agreeable at first, but if she flat out doesn't like you, there really isn't any super technique you can do to change that.  It's better to be your real self instead of putting on a front as a means to avoid rejection and get what I call fake success.  I mean, if you're an accountant for example, and you have to make up some story about how you are a professional assassin because some pickup guru told you to say that because she would think you're boring otherwise, isn't that not only being inauthentic but downright missing the point?  It also made meeting women into a spectator sport.

I think I need to stop at this for now.  There's so much more I want to say on it, but I'm running a marathon tomorrow.  If I survive, I will speak more of this later.