Guest post by ThoughtTrain

I’d like to relate the rubies of wisdom I received from my best bar stool buddy. You ever have someone at a bar you frequent you can just sit down next to and shoot the shit for hours and it’ll feel like a river of moments? I do, at what will always be my favorite bar. It’s a nerd bar, full of socially awkward geeks. Think the Renaissance Festival, but in bar form.

This man is twice my age and carries himself like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, with a touch of James Dean. Women melt when they see him while he gets progressively more uncomfortable as the room gets more crowded. He’s got that sad, jaded gaze with glitters of warmth and kindness, but you’d likely miss it unless you knew it was there. His lessons on life were learned while riding a motorcycle.

I sat down with him one stormy night, just a moon or two ago. Now, I’m relating all this because there are a few things I learned that night that help me in developing what I think of as the ThoughtTrain approach to life and dating. I related my recent time with women, telling the stories as I saw them from my shoes. He deconstructed my experiences and gave me some of his own. There was a gorgeous waitress and a free-wheeling biker girl among the memories and times gone by, but the common thread his and my stories had was they were situations where we created a moment with someone without any canned material or forcing anything using some technique. What this man has doing for over a decade, and what I am just learning to do, is simply talk.

That’s really it. Talk. Something I bet you are entirely capable of doing. Something I bet you, my reader friend, could thrive at. But you must commit to talking, to the exclusion of any and all other things that are going on in whatever place you happen to be. You don’t look at the other pretty girls at the bar, or the cool dudes walking by, or the bartender’s fancy moves, you pay attention to the person you’re talking to. You’ll notice things, learn things, get a window into the arc of their life story. These things you can talk about and relate stories that inform and enrich her understanding of something, the most interesting of things being herself. It’s the way people are. Wouldn’t you find it attractive if a girl came up and started trying to understand you on real and deep level? I do. Sometimes I get to have those moments though because sometimes you get back what you give. It’s a way to create value, but honestly, it just feels good, cathartic even.

The only catch is you cannot have an agenda, at all. It’s not so much “not giving a fuck” as not caring where any interaction is going. Take each moment as it comes without worry about the previous moment or the next. Get away from saying or doing things specifically intended to get in her pants. There is problem in it subconsciously makes you come off as “fake”, but the real reason for this has nothing to do with the woman across from you and everything to do with you. To derive your happiness from getting a response devalues yourself and the fruits of greater intimacy, which would be fine if it didn’t make everything seem so meaningless and every interaction so much like a test of your sense of worth. It’s the trap at the end of the path of pickup artist. This isn’t at all intuitive, but it does have the effect of releasing a great source of tension, at least a great source of tension inside of myself.

If you came to the interaction with no goal, than you cannot be rejected. You can treat every positive thing you are given, and some women will start giving when you start giving your undivided attention so freely, as a gift. People are gifts. You, my reader friend, are a gift, and you have gifts to give. Those gifts may end up being different than the gifts I give, that I invite you to give, but that only enriches all our lives. Shakedown gives very different gifts, but his gifts too are genuine and wonderful. Enjoy the people you find, enjoy yourself.

To close with the words of the band Dispatch: Don’t worry about a thing. You know your path is true. Just ease your mind, have a banana or two.