Twenty women I loved in my twenties :: X

“Just because she is beautiful, doesn’t mean you are ugly”. That sentence only exists, because most guys feel ugly when they bump into you.

You are wearing ripped jeans. The expensive kind of ripped jeans. Not the old faded jeans you ripped yourself. Designer ripped jeans. You’re in front of me, waiting in line at Panos, a sandwich bar. I am star struck. You buy something, you move to a table. You’re alone. And you haven’t looked at me, but you know I looked at you and you know what kind of reaction you’ve caused in my head. What kind of hormones my brain is producing. My attraction to you sends something out. You pick up on that. You get that a lot. Your feelers are wired, they see everything.

There’s a two second itch in my head to go over and talk to you. But what the fuck would I say then? Can I sit with you? Ask your name? Warn you your jeans are completely ripped? God, that’s lame.

But wait, really, why don’t I just walk over and ask your name? I mean, what’s the harm in that? Ok, I’d only ask because I want to tear your clothes off and drown in your body, but still. On the surface it’s just asking a name.

I don’t, because…

I feel like a dwarf suddenly.

I feel my glasses burn into my face and developing voices screaming ‘geek geek geek’.

I become acutely aware of the amount of money in my bank account. The sanity of my reflex is up for debate, but it’s there. A clerk in my head is doing some maths and concluding: sorry dude, you’re not rich enough to be with that girl. As if she has a six figure price tag stitched to the back of her neck. It’s crazy. It’s bullshit. And it blocks me. My internal belief system buys that shit, even if my objective train of thought doesn’t.

I start to think I have nothing to offer her. I’m afraid she doesn’t know anything. We won’t be able to have any kind of conversation. She’ll want to talk about blockbuster movies and the bad habits of her best friend. Which is fine, but it’s me who has to start the conversation and I haven’t seen the latest blockbuster movies and I have never met her best friend. Yes, objectively speaking I know this is a stupid prejudice. But my feet tend to listen to my prejudiced internal belief system. I’ll want to talk about shit I write, she’ll want to know how big my car is.

I feel my clothes dragging me down and I feel like I am clad like a homeless bum who hasn’t been able to take a shower in at least five days. Even though an hour ago I was in the shower.

I feel silly in advance, because it’s so very obvious why I would walk up to her.

I’m afraid what I say won’t be intelligible. I speak a dialect. It always takes a while before I slip into some kind of standardized language that a new conversation partner understands. Unless she’s from my home town, I’ll make a bad impression with my accent. Dialect is low status. I need high status to get this girl.

All this happens in less than ten seconds. The burden of this rationalisation hits me like a baseball bat right where it hurts. When I start walking, away from her, it’s like I’m working my way through some invisible clay. Part of me is still working to get me to walk the other way. Towards her.

The momentary dive towards zero self-esteem prevails. I walk away. I don’t talk to her. I’ll never see her again. A glimpse of her will linger. A lingering decision not to take action. Not so much a decision. A psychological booby-trap system that gets activated when I see a girl like that. And I walk away very humbled, down-trodden, stupid, wondering about how our society can make sex so pervasive on internet, in marketing, in products and yet still so burdened by limiting conventions in every day life. And the only comfort I have is that it’s not always like this. I have walked up to girls like her. Even today I am with a girl like that. So why not now? Because I’m obviously not in a peak state and haven’t been for a very long time. Every x I walk out on reminds me of this: the boundless hunger, confidence, energy, go go go attitude of youth isn’t there any more. I am sedated. Almost nurtured. And it’s fine. As long as I don’t bump into any x’s.

On average this happens to me once every three months. That’s four x’s in a year. Four girls that activate all male sexual impulses in my body. A force so strong I feel as though all the energy of the universe was squeezed into me, dying to get out. And still, all that force, is held in check by all this psychological baggage, prejudices, low self-image, aversion to looking silly and so on. The mind defeats the urge of the body. Yeah, the flesh is weak, but in a different sense.

On a good day, on a very good day, I can do it. I am ready for it. But then of course I don’t meet any x’s.

The x’s remind me I have something like CSD. Compulsive seduction disorder. Or what we used to call being a man.

And it’s tiresome to be a man. It’s only fun to be a man, when you are an all natural alpha male.

I don’t take pills for my CSD. I just marry the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met, the most beautiful to my eyes, and I ignore all other beautiful women. And then life is bearable. Like a junkie doing only controlled 100 percent pure heroin from only one certified dealer.

And so I build nice walls round my small kingdom. Where I got a nice way to make a living, the most beautiful woman I ever met or want to meet, lots of intellectual entertainment and no distractions that can trigger my CSD and all the ego shit that comes with that. And it frees up an enormous amount of time, ’cause seduction is time-consuming. And on occasion I can walk out the door without brushing my teeth, and I can go months without wearing a perfume that suits me, I can slouch, I don’t have to comb my hair every morning, because I don’t have to be prepared for going after x’s.

And so, slowly, I find myself fading into one of those guys I used to see, when I would think: how can they dress like that, don’t they want to have sex with beautiful women? Maybe they do, but they don’t want to pay the price for it.