Picture this.

Dave has chronic stomach pains for 3 weeks, so he goes to see a doctor. After a series of tests the doctor sits him down and solemnly tells Dave that he has bowel cancer.

The good news is, they’ve caught it early enough, and bowel cancer in it’s early stages has a 90% survival rate, if properly treated.

The doctor goes on to explain the treatment program. First there will be a serious operation to remove the tumor. Dave will have to have a colostomy bag for a while as a result. Then comes a course of chemo to make sure the cancer doesn’t spread to his blood. All in all, Dave will be very ill for a year. He’ll lose a lot of weight, feel tired all the time and be in some pain. After the year’s over he should have made a full recovery.

Dave doesn’t like the sound of that one bit. So much so, that he ignores the doctor’s treatment program, telling him, “Nah, just give me pain killers. That’ll stop my stomach hurting”. While this is true, Dave will then go on to die of cancer.

Who doesn’t think Dave is a fuck wit? No one would actually do that, right? Well, maybe not when it comes to cancer treatment. When it comes to improving at seduction though, the community has many Dave’s. It’s not just the seduction community. Treating the symptoms and not the disease is rife across all forms of self improvement.

Let’s take a look at some examples from the seduction community to illustrate my point.

One big problem many guys have is showing a woman their romantic / sexual intent. The core problem, or ‘disease’ here is actually a couple of things. The main one is a fear of rejection. When you let a girl know you like her, rather than just being friendly with her you’re putting your personality on the line and facing rejection. So fear of rejection is the big thing here. There is also the second issue here of men’s sexual desire being increasingly demonized in the western world (you can thank feminists for this). Some guys (mainly American’s I’ve found) view showing any form of romantic / sexual intent towards a girl as ‘creepy’ (American’s on PUA forums seem to use this word way too often).

So it’s the possibility of rejection / being creepy that needs to be addressed. Despite this people get side tracked by looking to treat the symptoms. The symptoms are:

Looking for ‘non creepy’ ways to approach Trying to find a way to get a girl from their friendship circle out on a date without her realizing it’s a date Getting friendzoned all the time and looking for a technique to break out from the friendzone Getting into lots of really long cold approach sets, and have them fizzle out with no obvious rejection but no close (I’m not including number closes here) Spending loads of time trying to decipher a girl’s words / text messages / actions to work out if she likes him

Another problem is not being happy with the way you live your life, and you’re not willing to put up boundaries to how people treat you in order to maintain your happy life and vet who’s allowed in to your life. You see the symptoms of this when people ask for specific responses to specific shit tests. They’re trying to build themselves a suit of armor made out of witty comebacks to protect themselves from challenges girls make to them. If you’re reasonably happy with how you live your life, and won’t tolerate people treating you badly then you won’t fail shit tests. Examples include guys asking how to handle being asked why they’re at a bar on their own, being told by girl’s that they’re players, asking how to respond when asked what they do for a living if they’re a computer programmer, etc.

The last ‘disease’ is simply not being attractive to women. The symptoms of this are rife throughout the community:

Looking for ways to improve their conversation skills. Many guys asking about conversation skills on forums actually have conversation skills which are good enough for pickup. It’s just that girls won’t talk to them for long in the club. This is usually because girls aren’t attracted to them, rather than the guy not having the conversational skills to “get her to stay”.

Buying accessories like big belts, rings, necklaces. All of these things are fine as an extension of your personality, but if a guy isn’t attractive to women then wearing a cool pendant isn’t going to help.

Trying to learn good text / phone game to stop girls flaking all the time. If your last 10 numbers flaked, then that’s not down to not sending the right text (unless you’re texting them something really retarded, even then some girls out of 10 should be responsive).

I think I need to now sit down and look for areas where I’m just treating the symptoms, diagnose the disease and start a treatment plan. I would urge you to do the same. Look at your sticking points but go deeper than what’s just going wrong on the surface. Keep burrowing deeper until you have found the route cause. You’ll know when you find it because it will be a deep issue usually concerning either fear, poor self image or poor lifestyle choices.

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Stats since 1st March:

10 number closes

6 kiss closes

1 f closes