As many of you know, when I was younger I was traditionally, monogamous married for nine years. During this nine-year stretch, I didn’t date or have sex with any other women besides my wife, obviously.

I didn’t go out on any dates. I didn’t flirt with women (at least not really). I didn’t engage in any conversations with women actually designed to lead to sex. I didn’t hang around attractive women (for the most part). I didn’t get any compliments from women. Women didn’t flirt with me (with rare exception).

Being long-term monogamous, I did what most long-term monogamous men eventually do. I stopped dressing nice, stopped paying attention to my physical appearance, gained weight, and let my hair get messy and stupid. I just stopped giving a shit about that stuff. Also like most long-term monogamous men, my testosterone dropped like a stone. My manliness, virility, and vitality slowly diminished.

For those of you who have never been in a scenario like that, just imagine you did that for nine years.

After those nine years, how do you think you would rate your own attractiveness? High, low, or average?

I wasn’t an ugly guy. I was a chubby guy, and I certainly wasn’t a good-looking guy, but I was average, not ugly at all. But do you think I thought I was average? After nine years of a lifestyle like that? Of course not. I thought I was ugly.

After my divorce in 2007, I questioned my ability to have sex with any “hot” woman. Why would any hot woman want to have sex with me? I’m ugly. I knew I could get sex, because hey, even ugly guys can eventually get laid, but I figured that for me to score with a hot woman would be extremely difficult.

A few months later, I had the experience I talked about here, where a woman I called “Alex,” a super hot, blonde, trim, sexy woman on a first date wanted to kiss me so bad that I was not only surprised, but I didn’t know what to do.

Why would a hot girl like this want to kiss me? And kiss me this fast? I’m ugly.

That night was over ten years ago, and I still remember driving home that night being totally confused, shaking my head as I drove. Alex is hot as hell. Why would a woman who is hot as hell want to kiss me so badly on a first date? I figured that an ugly guy like me could get a hot woman, but that it would take seven or eight dates and thousands of dollars spent to overcome my lack of physical attractiveness. This was a first date at a coffee shop in a bookstore that lasted about an hour, with about $7 spent. That’s all it took… and she wanted to kiss me? Already?

It didn’t make any sense to me.

After I had two more similar experiences like this, I slowly started to realize that my self-perception of what I looked like was not accurate to the external world. I realized that what other people saw when they looked at me was a different person than I saw in the mirror.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw a chubby, ugly, unattractive beta male. But other people, attractive women included, saw someone else. No, they didn’t see some hot, ripped guy, because I certainly wasn’t that either. But they certainly didn’t see the “ugly” guy that I saw in the mirror. They saw someone who was at least a little better looking than me, or else I wouldn’t have multiple attractive women interested in me on first dates when I wasn’t spending any money and when they knew I lived in a shitty little apartment with no bed because I was in the middle of a divorce.

Fast forward many years later, and as Blackdragon, I started seeing a pattern, over and over again with many guys I talked to. A guy would email me and ask for some dating advice. Then he would warn me that he was “really ugly” or “kinda ugly” or “unattractive” or “seriously ugly,” and that this would be a real problem for him to attract women. Maybe, he would say, my techniques wouldn’t work for him because he was “so ugly.”

So, I’d take his word for it and give him advice as if he was really fucking ugly, and wouldn’t give it another thought.

Then one day one of these guys actually sent me a picture of himself. I thought it was some kind of joke. The guy in the picture looked perfectly normal. Not gorgeous, but not ugly at all. Perfectly normal; someone who, if he just wore some better clothes, would be perfectly attractive to plenty of women, including very hot ones.

Then it happened again. A guy who would self-identify as ugly would send me a pic of himself, and he was better looking than me.

This started happening over and over again. The pattern was obvious.

The Western world is full of guys who are average looking or even mildly good-looking who actually think they’re ugly and that women won’t like them.

Normally, I would think these men are insane. But, I remember back when I was a recently monogamous beta and self-identified as ugly or unattractive myself when I really wasn’t. So I get it.

My theory, and I could be wrong but I don’t think so, is there are millions of decent-looking men all over the Western world who think they’re ugly because of these three factors:

1. Cultural deregulation of the sexual marketplace, where men need to go hunt for women instead of just being handed one like in the 1950s.

2. Social media, where really good-looking men and women are played up and displayed as if they’re much more common than they actually are in real life.

3. The ever-continuing shift to the political left in the Collapsing West, playing up things like feminism and strong women and downplaying (and even insulting) men, masculinity, and fathers.

Because of these three factors all working in tandem, tons of decent-looking men have actually become brainwashed into thinking they’re unattractive when they aren’t.

You may fall into this category. Statistically speaking, there are thousands of you guys reading these words right now who are better looking than me but who self-identify as ugly and think hot women won’t be attracted to you.

Since this is a totally irrational belief, there is no way I can convince you guys of this in just a single little article like this, but I’m going to try my best anyway.