Hey everyone,

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve posted. I apologize for that. I’m currently studying abroad and have been having such a blast that I’ve neglected to post here. But I’m still learning tons about game and social interaction, and I will post more frequently.

I felt a particularly strong urge to write a post now because of a tough emotional experience I’m going through. As you might remember from past blog posts, I broke up with my girlfriend of three years about six months ago over the summer. We had a very off-and-on relationship, but she was the first girl I’d ever been with and was the most important person in my life for a long time. We didn’t talk much in the months following our break-up, but rekindled over winter break, and since I’ve been abroad we’ve talked more frequently.

Well, the other night we FaceTimed and she revealed to me that she’d started seeing someone new. Even though we stopped dating a while ago and even though I thought my involvement in the PUA community would preclude me from feeling one-itis, it felt like a punch in the guts to hear that. This was a girl that I’d had extreme one-itis for since I met (even while we were dating) so it was tough to hear that she’d moved on, even though I had hooked up with other girls since. I really can’t say I’m surprised to hear she’s dating again, it never takes great girls too long to get back on their feet.

Anyways, this event inspired me to write about how to deal with the emotions that one-itis and rough breakups bring. I’m writing both for myself, to help me personally work through what I’m feeling, and to help any of you out there who might be going through something similar.

For the uninitiated, one-itis is the feeling you get when you feel like a girl is “the one” for you. This might sound like a good thing, like you’re ready to get happily married, but that’s usually not the case. One-itis generally comes from a place of desperation and neediness. It’s when you feel like you can’t live without one particular girl and all of your emotions get tied up in the way you feel towards her. Guys with one-itis tend to feel like this one girl has all the answers to their problems and they think that if they could just have her, they would be satisfied with life. The problem with one-itis is that it borders on obsession, and more often than not, the girl does not reciprocate these feelings. She feels smothered by clinginess and will usually turn away guys that they sense have one-itis for them.

I think that feeling one-itis for a girl and going through a tough breakup have a lot in common. Both involve a lot of negative emotions, like feeling lost, feeling like you have no control, and wishing that everything could just be the way you want it to be. Sometimes, breakups can happen cleanly, with no leftover guilt or bad emotions. But usually, especially if you’ve spent a long time with a person and have invested a large part of yourself into them, there will be strong emotions to deal with, which are often very similar to those experienced by people with one-itis.

Let’s talk for a second about why people feel one-itis. Why do some people get it and others don’t? Why is it easy for some people to move on after a breakup and so difficult for others? There are several reasons for this. A big one is that it develops when you place more importance on your girl’s life than on your own life. You develop one-itis when you start to buy into the girl’s reality instead of your own (this happens especially if the girl you’re with has a strong frame). You start to think more about everything going on in the girl’s life than what’s going on in yours. I remember feeling some fucked up feelings because I was so focused on what my girlfriend was doing instead of what I had going on in my own life. If I saw a picture of her with other people, I would want to know what she was doing and who they were. If I found out that she had hooked up with another guy when we were on a break, I would get insanely jealous and hurt, even though I myself had hooked up with other girls. I would find things going on in her life to be more important than even she did. It came to the point where I would constantly check her Twitter to see what she was up to and if there were any clues that she was doing things I wouldn’t approve of. If we were talking, I would subtly work in probing questions to the same effect. I was paranoid. I wanted to know absolutely everything that was happening in her life, and I would frequently overreact. I was like an overbearing parent who forces their kid to do their homework because they are more on top of their kid’s life than the kid is. Of course, when you try to control other people’s lives, it does not work out well.

There are other reasons why these negative emotions develop. For a lot of guys, they feel better when they were with the girl than before they had her, so they’re afraid of losing her because they don’t want their life to go back to the way it was before they met her. This was definitely the case with me. Before I met her, I was a huge loser. I didn’t have any friends, didn’t have anyone I talked to outside of class, and I spent my weekends playing video games, browsing the internet, and watching porn. But when I met her, my life became so much more fun and I felt like less of a loser. Going on dates made me feel so much better because it was a huge step up from what I had been doing before. We would see movies, try different restaurants, and do a lot of activities that I would never do when I was by myself. That made it very difficult to imagine life without her, because I was afraid that I would go back to being a loser if I didn’t have her.

Another reason that one-itis develops is because you’re trying to fill a hole in your life. Maybe you’re not satisfied with how life is going, but then she came along and everything seemed okay. If you’re insecure with who you are as a man, you might think that having a girl by your side will make you whole. But although her affection might offer some short-term relief, your insecurities will come back and hit you just as hard. You’re better off trying to fix them on your own than to mix them up in your relationship. Don’t make your insecurities her problem; she doesn’t want to have anything to do with them and she will be of little help to help you get over them. She is looking for a STRONG man who has his shit together, or at least acts like it. Another reason that one-itis occurs is because it feels good to live up to other people’s expectations. If you aren’t grounded in yourself as a man and you don’t know where you’re going in life, one way to feel accomplished is by living up to the standards that other people want you to do, whether it’s your parents, your friends, or your girl. This happens when you buy into the girl’s frame and you believe that the person she wants is the person you must be, and you must do everything you can to be that person. Essentially, you’re jumping through hoops. And it feels good when you pass her tests, because you feel validated and you feel like you’ve made someone happy. But you’ve sacrificed a part of who you are for someone else’s benefit, a benefit which, incidentally, does not make her respect or love you more, but makes her see you as a pushover. One-itis develops when you feel that the girl is higher value than you are, and that by being with her, you have moved up in the world. It develops when you put others ahead of yourself and put their self-worth above yours.

So, how do you get over these feelings? The most important thing to realize when you’re suffering from one-itis or going through a breakup is that you’re not in control of yourself. When you have these feelings, you are literally outsourcing your emotions to the other person and letting them be in charge of how you feel. You’ve essentially given this person your heart and told them “Here, take my heart and do whatever you want with it.” You’ve invested so much of yourself in this person that you no longer have any power over yourself, and instead let the girl determine your emotions.

Some people might read this and say, “So what if I invest myself in other person? I like depending on another person.” Believe me, I know where you’re coming from. Sometimes having one-itis does make you feel happy. You feel happy whenever the girl validates you. When I was in my relationship, there were plenty of ups and downs. Whenever we were getting along, or she told me she loved me, or I got her off in bed, I felt amazing. On the flip side, I would feel like complete shit if things weren’t going well and I wasn’t receiving positive feedback from her. I’m not saying that you should never care about someone or never invest in a girl who makes you feel good. I agree that to have a fulfilling relationship, you have to invest part of yourself and make yourself vulnerable to heartbreak. But you should never do it at the cost of losing your own self-image as a man. At the end of the day, you have to be the one in control of yourself. Having other people around you enriches your life, but you should never sacrifice who you are for them. Having one-itis or lots of difficulty getting over a tough breakup is bad because it speaks to a deeper problem within yourself–that you aren’t capable of living your life YOUR way. If you find yourself constantly stuck in these emotional loops, it’s because you are too dependent on others in order to determine your own self-worth. You start to think that your identity comes from your relationship, that you are who you are because you’re defined by how other people see you. You need to BREAK OUT of this loop and reestablish yourself as a centered man who is okay with himself the way he is.

What these emotions really come down to is where you get your state from. Do you get your state from within yourself, or from your surroundings? The problem that many guys face is that they treat their relationships with women like a game of ping pong. As long as the ball is in play and they are exchanging positive emotions and experiences with their partner, both giving and receiving, they feel great. But as soon as the ball falls off the table and hits the ground, you feel empty inside because you’re no longer receiving those emotions. What you need to learn to do is to generate positive emotions from within yourself and not be dependent on anyone else to derive your sense of self-worth. You need to imagine that you have a bag full of ping pong balls, or good emotions that come from within you, and even if one ping pong ball falls, you are ready to fire back more and more because the good emotions come from inside you and are not dependent on whether things are going well or not with your girl. You feel good regardless. Getting over one-itis or breakups makes you much emotionally stronger because you come to realize that YOU ARE ENOUGH. You realize that you don’t need to depend on someone else for your happiness. You are in charge of your own destiny.

If you’ve checked out my recommended reading list, you’ll find the book The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida, a book I HIGHLY recommend. One of the fundamental points he makes in this book is that as a man, you are primarily driven by your purpose in life, whatever that may be. Love, relationships, and romance, although very important to men, are not actually the most important things. Men are fundamentally driven by their desire to impact the world through their actions and by achieving their goals. I think that this can help you get over girls that you can’t stop thinking about. What you need to realize is that women are secondary to your main purpose in life. Women are there to enrich your life, and you can have very meaningful relationships with them, but ultimately you have to be driven by something deeper than that. If your relationships with women are not perfect, that’s okay, because deep down you care more about fulfilling your larger purpose in life. You can be comfortable knowing that if you focus on this as your main priority, your relationships with women will fall in line. If you find that you spend every waking moment thinking about women, or one woman in particular, take a step back and try to think about what you really want to get out of life. This will help you put things in perspective and help you realize that there are more important things to spend your time worrying about. It will help you get over your obsession of one girl.

In a similar vein, something that can help you immensely to get over your one-itis is to develop an ecosystem of abundant positive emotions within your life (a term I stole from Tyler Durden–check out his video here). What this means is that you have so much going on in your life that even if one thing goes wrong, like your relationship, your world doesn’t come crashing down. It means that you have a multitude of sources in your life that bring you positive emotions. Imagine two men. One man has nothing going on in his life. He spends all day browsing the Internet, has no career ambitions, doesn’t have hobbies, doesn’t have a strong social circle, and doesn’t enrich the world with his presence. But let’s say he somehow gets a girlfriend who manages to love him. Odds are, he will become obsessed with this girl because she’s the only source of real emotion in his life, and he clings to that. She makes him feel good when he has nothing in his life to make him feel that way, and he is unable to generate those emotions on his own. Eventually, she will dump him because she realizes that he has nothing going for him and is dragging her down. The man will develop strong one-itis and will try to desperately hold on to her, but it will be a losing battle. He realizes that she was the best thing that ever happened to him, and now he has nothing to bring him happiness.

On the other hand, imagine a man who has a lot going for him. He has a job he loves, great prospects for the future, and a positive social life full of people who enjoy being around him. He exercises frequently, spends his time doing the things he loves, and there is nothing else he would rather be doing in life. Odds are, girls flock to him because of the environment around him that he has created. He will probably never even develop one-itis because his life is already so great that he generates positive emotions from within and doesn’t need a girl to feel validated. She is just there for the ride and to amplify his already great life. Even if he does develop strong emotions for a girl and things go sour, it will not be the end of the world for him because he has so many other things going on in his life. It’s like popping one bubble in a sheet of bubble wrap. It doesn’t damage the integrity of who he is. People who have built an ecosystem of positive emotions never get brought down too hard by any one event in their life because they have so many other things going on.

In life, you should never put all your eggs in one basket. It’s important to develop as many areas of your life as possible. We call this abundance. You have to look at the world from a perspective of abundance. What this means is that you do not get caught up by any one little thing. You are bigger than that and have much more going for you. Nothing that one girl does to you can affect you that much because you know that there are a ton more out there. The world is your oyster. Eventually you realize that you are FREE and you are in control of how you feel. You have to stop being passive and complacent. You have to stop just “accepting” the world and whatever it gives you. You have to stand up and start doing things that express who you are. As David Deida would say, you have to give your gift to the world. When you do this, you start to realize that you don’t need anyone else to make you feel good, because you make yourself feel good. And that feeling of making yourself feel good is so much stronger, and more permanent, than any emotions that you leech off a girl. This is part of the reason why I love writing here. It’s something that is truly ME and I can look back and say, wow, I created that. It makes me feel alive and like I’m moving towards the things I want to accomplish in life. It’s so much better than passively sitting on reddit all day and looking at whatever funny pictures they have to show you today. Stop living your life vicariously through trivial things that you don’t really care about. Create your own reality. You are the star of your own movie. Find the things that you love doing, and give yourself to them.

You might feel like it’s impossible to get over these negative emotions. You might feel chronic one-itis over a girl that you’ve had a crush on for a long time, or maybe a girl who broke up with you and you never got over. You spend all day thinking about how perfect it would be if you could just be together. Now, it’s okay to feel some negative emotions due to one-itis or tough breakups FOR A WHILE. It’s okay to need to give yourself time to heal. But if you find that these feelings never seem to go away, then you have a bigger problem on your hands. What you need to realize is that you might actually be ADDICTED TO NEGATIVITY. It sounds crazy, but it’s easy to get trapped into feeling negative emotions all the time. You know these negative feelings that you keep feeling? A sense of longing for the girl, wishing that things had worked out better, etc? Part of you actually loves these feelings. I know I did. Even though I felt like shit a lot during my relationship, I was addicted to the sense of self-pity that came about when things weren’t going well. I loved feeling sorry for myself. I loved feeling like a victim. And what I realized after a while was that it became so easy to just “hit that trigger” and feel that way whenever the smallest thing happened. Even though it’s a negative emotion, it’s a strong emotion nonetheless, and your brain is addicted to feeling strong emotions.

The reason why it becomes so easy to fall into these negative emotion loops is actually due to your brain being lazy and falling into a lower level of consciousness. When you feel an emotion like self-pity a lot, your brain wires itself so that it is very easy to feel that emotion. It becomes a pathway in your brain that can be accessed at a moment’s notice. That’s why it’s so easy to get stuck feeling this way ALL THE TIME. Because you don’t have the energy to bring yourself out of this way of thinking, you just let your mind get stuck. As C.S. Lewis said, “The danger is that of coming to love the prison.” People don’t realize how addicting negativity can be, especially to those who haven’t built up an ecosystem of abundance in their lives. When you fall into negative thought paths, you essentially become a whiny 14 year old emo kid. What, do you think it makes you cool or edgy to carry this emotional baggage around with you everywhere you go? It doesn’t. Let it go. You will be freer and happier. I remember after having fights with my girlfriend, in addition to feeling shitty, I would also feel in some ways superior to others that I was going through tough emotional matters. I thought, “look at everyone else. They’re off goofing around while I’m dealing with something much more serious.” Don’t delude yourself into thinking that feeling negative emotions all the time makes you in any way superior to those that are happy and having fun. You have to realize that this is a state of lower consciousness. It’s where you are not defining how you want to feel, but letting yourself become burdened by outside influences. You need to wake up and decide that you want to be in control of your thoughts and feelings.

A big realization for me was when I realized that I didn’t really love my girlfriend, but I loved the idea of my girlfriend. Our relationship itself actually kind of sucked, but I built it up in my head to be this amazing thing and I pictured her as being the most amazing girl in the world. In reality though, our relationship was not that great. When we actually hung out, it was kind of boring. Sure, it was fun to have someone to hang out with, someone to do fun things with, someone to have sex with, but we weren’t really becoming better people by being with each other. We were comfortable with each other and too afraid to sacrifice that comfort for the possibility of something better. It’s interesting, when I was with her, near the end of our relationship, I was starting to think about how good it would be if we split up. But after we did, I could only think about what it would be like to be back with her. But then when we actually were back together over winter break, it went back to being shitty. It’s only when I was alone and in my head that I would picture her to be the perfect girl for me. But that was not reflected by reality. I realized that I had built her up in my head to be someone that I shared an amazing bond with, but in reality, we didn’t have that anymore and it was time to move on. Don’t hold on so much to the past, even if what you had was great. If you do that, you won’t be able to focus on the present moment and feeling good NOW.

A quick analogy–the other day I was walking home when a cute little kitty walked up to me, asking to be pet. Now, I love cats, but I was too caught up thinking about whatever I had to do to give it any attention, so I gave it a quick pat on the head and kept going. I realized that this was a metaphor for my relationship; I’ve been too caught up thinking about my past relationship with her that I was unable to appreciate when something nice came into my life. How many opportunities do you think you’ve missed out on by being too preoccupied with other things going on? You must recognize that whether the past was good, or it was bad, it’s in the past. There is a whole world of beauty out there, of people to meet and things to experience, and the only way you can relish it is by focusing on here and now.

Now, I’m gonna tell you how to get over negative thought loops. The first thing you need to realize is that what you are feeling are negative emotions and that you don’t want to feel them anymore. That is the first and most important step. You have to realize that this is shitty, pathetic, weak, un-manly, unattractive behavior that benefits NOBODY. No one wants to be around a person that feels this way all the time. The next thing that you need to focus on doing is rewiring your brain to become un-addicted to the negative emotions, and RE-ADDICT yourself to positivity. You essentially tell yourself that you’re not going to allow yourself to feel shitty anymore, and instead you’re going to replace those feelings with positive emotions. You can try doing a positivity challenge like Tony Robbins suggests, where for a period of ten days, every time you feel a negative emotion, you immediately reframe it into a positive one. For instance, you might get stuck in negativity and think “Man, I just wish I could have her back in my life.” Immediately reframe that into “There are lots of amazing people in the world. Instead of getting stuck up over one, I’m gonna try to meet as many people as I can.” You’ll realize that the positive emotion is much stronger than the negative one and after a while of doing this, you’ll find yourself becoming addicted to the good emotion.

Another way you can get over negative emotions is by focusing on being present to the moment. This is something Eckhart Tolle talks about in his book The Power of Now (also recommended reading). He says that you can eliminate negativity from your life by only thinking about the present moment and not the past or the future. When you think about it, most negative emotions brought on by one-itis are either directed towards the past or the future. You might have thoughts like: “I remember back when we were together, I felt so happy” or “My future will suck if I don’t have her with me.” But if you stay present to the current moment, you can ask yourself “What is bothering me RIGHT THIS INSTANT?” and you’ll find that right now, you really have nothing bothering you, and you are at peace. When you are present, stress and worries melt away because the only moment that matters to you is this moment, right now. Doing meditation helps a lot with this, and I would recommend trying to do it for at least 20 minutes a day. I just started doing it and it feels great. Just sit quietly and try to become present, and let all thoughts leave you. Meditating is a great way to draw state from within yourself, because you are entirely within yourself at that moment and not drawing state off of your environment. You realize that you are okay the way you are and that negative emotions have no purpose in your life.

When I’m thinking about how I want to be, I like to think about great men that have come before me and ask myself what they would do. I think of great men who changed the world, like Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, or George Washington. Would any of these men have their lives ruined if things didn’t work out with a girl? Hell no. If you’re any of these men, you’re coming from a position where you know that YOU are where it’s at, YOU are the one who is offering value. You have so much to offer the world that you don’t even have time to leech value off of a girl. Shit, if you were Genghis Khan, you would be fucking so many girls that you simply would not care. And you’d have such a large impact on the world that 3% of the world population is directly descended from you. That’s power, man. He didn’t spend his time crying over whether a girl returned his feelings or not. He spent his time fucking the world, and found a purpose that was much bigger than just his relationships with girls. The fact that he was such a pimp was a byproduct of the lifestyle that he created.

Here’s another example to show that you are usually better off when you focus on developing yourself instead of desperately chasing after girls’ validation. One of my friends from high school, Mike, was going through a very tough breakup last summer after his girlfriend of several years suddenly dumped him. He was a wreck. He became an alcoholic and a drug abuser because it was the only way he could fill the void in his life that she left. He felt like he had no purpose without her by his side. Fast forward six months when I saw him over winter break. He looked amazing. He had gotten over his breakup and used those negative emotions as fuel to become a better man. He had been sober for the last several months, had gotten back into cycling and was competing in races, and was seeing other girls. I asked him if he missed his ex, and he said that breaking up with her was the best thing that could have happened to him. It made him realize that he was dependent on her for his self-worth, and even though being with her felt good sometimes, it wasn’t stable to constantly be basing who he was off of her. After his breakup, he realized that he needed to focus on himself for a while, and he started to become the kind of guy who OFFERS value instead of TAKES it.

Getting over one-itis or tough breakups, as shitty as it can feel, is probably one of the best things that can happen to you. It is always darkest right before the sun rises. Yes, there are a lot of incredibly tough emotions to deal with. But by overcoming them, you will become a stronger person. You will be free. I realized that when I was in a relationship, I became complacent and lazy. I didn’t feel like I had to work to improve myself anymore because I already found someone who I was comfortable with. I wasn’t working as hard as I could have been. But when that person is gone, you realize that now is the time when you can be completely honest with yourself and truly strive for self improvement. Use this time in to focus on other areas of your life. It sounds like cliche breakup advice, but try working out, enjoying your hobbies, developing friendships, or devoting yourself to your career. In the long run, you will be happy that you cut off these negative emotions because it allowed you to focus on things that were more important.

And if you are really stuck up on this one girl, you can listen to the tried-and-true pickup advice from the community: GFTOW–Go Fuck Ten Other Women. It sounds like vane, superficial advice, but it will do a lot for you to put yourself back into the right mental space. If you fuck ten other women, you will return to a state of abundance, where you stop focusing so much on one girl and instead realize that the world has a lot to offer. By the time you’ve fucked ten other women, you might have realized that the girl you had one-itis for wasn’t really that special after all. Or, if you’re still into her, you will now have the skills to actually attract her because you’ve fucked ten women and you’re not needy anymore. Instead, you’re coming from a place where you could actually have a meaningful relationship with her.

Getting over these complex emotions is tough. I know. It’s one of the hardest things to get over because of just how intense the emotions can be. But ultimately you realize that the world is not here to give you things for free. It’s here to challenge you and to present you with situations that make you stronger. It will be tough, but believe me, you will come out a much better person on the other end when you realize that you are in control of your life and not dependent on someone else to bring you positive emotions. I will end this post with one of my favorite poems, Invictus. It’s a poem about overcoming attachment to things out of your control, being independent, and finding inner strength in the face of adversity. Pay special attention to the final lines.

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.