Love Quest Victories
Dear [Mentat],
You can fail at anything. You can succeed at anything. It just depends on the standards you apply. Set them too low, and success means nothing. Set them too high, and success can’t happen. I took piano lessons in 1995 for several months taking twelve weeks learning to play “Deck the Halls” without the book and without errors. Holistically, I found this neither particularly successful, nor enjoyable. Oh, it felt good once I finally got it, and there were little victories along the way like mastery of the chorus and verse sections. But my, what frustration! True, it wasn’t a failure in that I lost little of value for the effort. But a year later, when I tried playing the piece again, and found that I couldn’t, this was when I felt the most like I failed at piano. The good feelings of learning the song evaporated along with the memory of how to play it. If the measure of success here was just to learn how to play the song well, then, yes, I suppose did that. But I didn’t win much of intrinsic lasting value because, I believe, there was no one but me to appreciate the fruits of the work. More on that below.
Now, to relationships [and my own love quest]: Therapists often employ a divide-and-conquer technique to step patients past crippling anxiety. If a person fears flying for example, and dreads even getting on the plane, the therapist has him just go to the airport. In this visit, the patient gets nearer to the planes than he would if he stayed home watching them on TV. But he doesn’t get near enough to trigger panic attacks. The object here is simply to get him comfortable being close to planes even though he cannot get into them yet. Then, on the next visit, he might approach the ticket window. And once he’s comfortable with that, then he moves into the ticketed-passengers-only areas, near the gates. And when he no longer feels anxious near the gates, then he visits the tarmac, and eventually, after perhaps many more tries, actually boards the planes with ease. With each visit, he gets closer and closer to where he ultimately needs to be (in the plane and in the air) while keeping his anxiety at bay.
But while these intermediate victories are indeed stepping stones to his ultimate goal, they are not the ultimate goal itself, and have little useful externally-measured value unless he realizes that end goal. Eventually, he’ll have to actually perform – to get in that plane and ride it for an entire flight, without becoming hysterical. These small wins, while essential to the patient’s development, mean nothing really unless he eventually can fly on demand.
Now he may never entirely beat his fear of flying. Yet he has achieved externally-measurable success if his fears no longer keep him from it. As long as he can fly, then it doesn’t matter how much anxiety remains. Again, the externally-measured end results determine the usefulness of the means used to reach them.
Like fear of flying, social anxiety [on the love quest] can be most distressing. As we’ve discussed I’ve fought many battles against it so I could at least approach beautiful women if not get them into my bed. Initially, I just put myself into situations where I’d likely encounter these ladies. Dr. Phil calls this a target-rich environment. As long as I got to these target-rich environments, I claimed myself victorious, even if I talked to no one, even if I didn’t leave that night with a girl on my arm, and even if she never made it to my bedroom. Then, after I got comfortable going out routinely, I’d start striking up conversations, then offering to buy them drinks, then asking for dances, then asking for more dances, then asking for slow dances, and so on. Now at any point along this continuum, I could succeed as long as I expected myself to go no further than I’d actually come. That is, as long as I got myself to the dance hall I could celebrate triumph, for at least I kept anxiety from paralyzing me to that point. Or, as long as I said hello to every eligible lady there, then I’d win, whether they accepted or rejected me. But again, like our patient afraid to fly, these little successes have limited value unless they eventually lead us to what we want in the material world, or they at least offer periodic assurances that we’re moving fast enough and in the right direction to actually get what we want there. In this sense (as opposed to a moral one), the ends really do justify the means. If we get what we want, then the means were good. If we don’t, then the means were ineffective and bad. Some would even say pointless. [Ultimately, you can't win at the love quest until you actually bag the lady.]
It’s easy to get high on these intermediate, in-mind successes [however]. But in order to achieve anything truly pleasurable that involves obtaining something from the surrounding world, the bar must be positioned high enough to offer difficult but achievable challenge. Success is pointless unless there was a chance of failure because the threat of failure enables us to bask in success, when victory finally comes. In fact, the greater the risk of failure, the sweeter the victory. Victory without challenge has little value.
This is particularly true when we apply the external standards of success of which you spoke. I’d argue that success and failure acquire the most poignant meaning when others evaluate us, such as bosses do in jobs, as town elders do in community activities, as the audience does when we publicly perform, as friends do when we do things with them, and as women do when we approach them. Victories taste the sweetest and losses the most bitter, when others determine our performance rating. Perhaps our basic need for others’ approval makes this so. It makes sense that we’d react more strongly to external evaluations than to those we conduct on ourselves in self-centered activities.
To put this in an EP [evolutionary psychology] perspective, if the crowd around us sees and likes what we do, our chances of survival, and thus our reproductive advantages, rise. If the crowd hates us on the other hand, our survival rates drop because we can’t acquire as many resources, can’t as easily get help when we need it, and we’ll likely suffer due to the crowd’s wrath. Successes mean the most to our wellbeing when others deem us successful. [It's good to be liked by others.] If our biggest dreams center on something in the material world, something not entirely within the confines of our minds and personal space, then we must interact with that world and subject ourselves to its (external) measures to get our hearts desire.
I admit that working in a vacuum on projects [by yourself] where others can’t see your accomplishments has a definite appeal. Such projects include meditation, introspection, reflection, self-growth, and answering in our own ways the myriad questions [that life and] living pose. Now finding such answers can be thrilling, yes, even when they apply not to other people. But, if your accomplishments aren’t clearly visible to others, when you’re the only one who determines what success means, then you’re right. You cannot fail at piano, or anything else. If your only worry is playing the piano alone, then there’s little risk of public humiliation, and I might add, less reason to strive hard to do better. Take away external measures, and you remove a potent motivator to grow.
At [work], they often spoke of “Results Orientation,” wanting us to write our objectives and achievements in results-oriented (as opposed to activity-oriented) ways. The activities oriented person might write the following: I read ten books this year on Windows programming, attended twenty classes that I aced, spent six-hundred hours writing code, and met with thirty customer firms. Sounds like a busy person, ‘eh? But what does this tell us about what he really did to benefit the company? Not a whole lot, right? It’s nice that he ‘aced’ the classes. But so what? Acing classes in and of itself counts for little. While his excellent class performance could be viewed as a personal success for him, unless he does something with it to improve the company’s viability, by external measures, it’s worthless.
The results-oriented person on the other hand, might write these same things, but also show how these activities improved the bottom line. He might write: I learned enough about Windows programming to implement a new billing system that so far, has saved the company five-hundred thousand dollars in lost revenues in its first three months in production. The new system took six hundred hours to code, longer than one might expect. However the extra development time helped create a highly reliable system that hasn’t crashed once, nor corrupted any of the billing data. No billing system prior to this one has ever done so well upon initial release. My twenty management-training classes enabled me to achieve zero attrition this year in my software team. Surveys suggest that my people are very happy with how they’re being treated, and they say that because I try hard to get them the assignments they want, their productivity is much higher than before I took over. To introduce the new billing system to customers, I visited thirty of our biggest ones this year. They report that they’ve switched over to it without serious problems, and so all have migrated away from the older one now.
You see the difference between results and activities orientation? The claims of the results person are easier to independently verify, because he relates his accomplishments in terms that any manager will appreciate: the company’s bottom line. He shows steadfast concern for that bottom line by choosing only activities that have a clear and high-impact benefit, and he’s careful to make sure we understand how everything he does benefits the company. It’s obvious that he’s not just “keeping busy.”
But all the activities colleague really implies is just that; that he’s good at staying busy. We don’t know why he decided to read the ten books on Windows programming or even if he read them at all. He has demonstrated no gain from reading them that means anything to us. Yes, we could find out from accounting if he attended the twenty management-training classes; classes that by the way, cost the company thousands. But whether he attended or not is not the relevant issue. Again, he does not justify this training in meaningful, externally-measured terms. For all we know, he enjoys taking classes for strictly his own edification at the company’s expense. The way he wrote makes him appear like he has little regard for that all-important bottom line and the things he does to affect it. He’s more concerned with his own growth than the company’s, even though it’s the company that’s footing his education bill not to mention feeding and sheltering him. He hides behind his flurry of activities, hoping that bosses will be awed so much by it that they’ll just not probe deeper to understand why he’s busy. However, this strategy in these days of unsettled economic times, won’t get him very far.
Bosses appreciate introspective, reflective, self-growing people. But only so much. The awe inspired by “the intellectual” won’t last long if he produces nothing tangible that quickly benefits the company in terms of dollars and cents. So while one can avoid failure by isolating himself and never subjecting his work to external measures, he’ll also be avoiding in my opinion, the most beneficial successes too. He may indeed be a highly advanced thinker inside. But unless that’s apparent to others through what he does, he’ll never receive the respect and group approval due him, making the fulfillment of level four needs [in Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle] difficult to achieve. He won’t be rated as highly as he could be by bosses and peers unless he passes their measures; measures external to himself.
Hermits are very often activities oriented people. For them, keeping busy without a clearly defined purpose that passes external measures, helps keep the most painful sorts of failure away. They side-step accountability by keeping to themselves and appearing busy. Loner tendencies appear to stem from intense fears of failure in fact. After all, it’s embarrassing to be judged harshly for something you’ve put your heart and soul into for months (or years). When there’s no one else but yourself to please, you’ll never be subject to that potent sort of rejection that challenges the self-esteem and confidence gravely.
However, if your standards of self-success involve others’ approval (which they must in any team-oriented pursuit I know of), then you will indeed fail at times, and at times, miserably. There’s no way around it. External standards change from day to day. And even if they didn’t, our understanding of them grows and ebbs. Often, we’re not even aware of external measures until we fail to meet them, as happens so often with children. True, as [Dr. Albert] Ellis implies, failing to meet or exceed group expectations never makes you a worthless person. But I’m not sure how useful this insight really is. Repeated public failures, though they don’t make you worthless, can still make your life quite painful. When working and playing in a community, and not by yourself, there are expectations to meet that we cannot always fulfill. And when we don’t, we’ll feel like we failed, and are treated like it too. Keeping in mind that we’re always worthy whether we fail or not may take the edge off of such embarrassments. But it won’t mask the bulk of the disappointment.
Relationships [and the love quest in general] are particularly difficult in this regard because we have to meet with the other’s approval in so many more ways than if they were simply another member of the community, or living life by ourselves. Perhaps relationships suffer more disadvantages than those pursuits that you can execute alone. Nonetheless, working collectively always involves measures of success external to ourselves, particularly so in romance. It’s not only relationships, but also any pursuit involving synergy with others that has the drawbacks you’ve attributed to love relationships. So be careful. More than any self-centered goal, nothing produces more thrill than success within groups. The downside though, is that neither does anything make more emotional upset when you fail the group.
I make such a big deal about this because you seem to be disparaging the relevance of external measures, sighting how they complicate our quest for fulfillment. Yes, they do certainly complicate it. But as noted, they also make possible much higher highs of happiness. As any gambler would tell you: The greater the risks, the greater the rewards. It just depends on how much you want to risk. Clearly, in-the-mind-only pursuits are less risky than those involving external measures. And accordingly, their victories don’t feel as nice either.
Yes, you can certainly fail at finding a desirable relationship. Heaven knows I’m living proof of that. But I feel like I’m closer to realizing the dream than ever before. My involvement with women in terms of percentage of time per year has risen steadily over the decades. I spent more time in this decade talking to mating prospects than in any previous decade. These days, if I wanted to, I could be in bed with perhaps five different women just for the price of a phone call. Back in the seventies on the other hand, the number of ladies immediately available for bed was much less, and usually zero. Also, the quality of the women (as measured in terms of height, weight, education level, moral makeup, character, and overall attractiveness) has also gone up. So I’m definitely getting better at selecting, and then, being able to get the ones I’ve selected to a romantic dinner. My own skill level at mating seems to have risen, and with it, has come more little successes.
I’d have to disagree with your statement that all the skill in the world won’t get you the women you want, particularly when numerous, past attempts have failed. In my own admittedly subjective and limited experiences, the presence of better women in my life today, than in the seventies and eighties, suggests that we can improve our situations by acquiring more skill and experience. If it’s true that fear is the single biggest deterring force to success, and if it’s also true that knowledge and understanding combat fear, then it stands to reason that we can be more successful at getting what we want, the more we learn about how to get it. Knowledge and fulfillment go hand-in-hand. The more we know, the less fear we have, and in theory, the less our successes will be hindered.
The amount of knowledge we can accumulate would seem to have no clear upper bound, particularly since even the most experienced, knowledgeable people utilize but twenty percent of their brains over their entire lives. Also, you would agree that it’d be hard to prove that, of all the available knowledge left to learn or create, that absolutely none of it could bring my dream girl to me. Knowledge is power and you can accomplish most anything, if you have enough of the right knowledge.
I’ve heard religious leaders teach that there is nothing more wrong with a wanting man than his ignorance. They say that only unawareness keeps us from the object of desire and that a chronic desire indicates a chronic lack of appropriate knowledge. If you want, they say, then there’s something that you need to learn. Desire is the universe’s way of motivating you to learn what you must. Now I’ve accomplished so much by reducing my ignorance, that I’m forced to agree with them in principle. I wanted to be an electronics technician. Initially, my ignorance kept me from doing that. But after studying for several years, I became a good one. At Pitt, I wanted a degree in computer science and had to acquire the knowledge to make that a reality as well. Then, I became a software engineer for fifteen years. What they say seems to work, and, applying a bit of inductive thinking, I hope that it follows that I’ll also realize my biggest challenge so far [winning at the love quest] by acquiring useful knowledge.
In terms of knowledge, any pursuit is like this. You want to accomplish something, and almost invariably you can once you acquire the right knowledge. This of course, assumes that the right knowledge is available or that you can invent it. But when you do have it, you can do anything you want.
Now you’re probably thinking that my resolve to continue and intensify the quest hinges on a lot of blind faith. If you are, then You’d be right. There is much of that involved when chasing dreams, because we don’t know what precisely we need to learn, or if we’ll ever stumble upon it in our lifetimes. But this is where those internally-measured successes are most useful. As discussed, they may have no real value to others. But they can help make the faith less blind and more justified in our own hearts, thus motivating us to press on even with failure all around, and with a bit of luck, achieve success that others can see. I have seen my situation improve with women over the decades as discussed above. And even though you could argue that so far this has been meaningless since a lastingly desirable mate still eludes me, it seems that the women I dated in 2000 for example, were on the whole, closer to that ideal than they were in the eighties and nineties ([First Love] excluded). I’m selecting better these days, approaching better, not bailing out so quickly when problems arise, and have learned how to avoid many such problems in the first place by following my “formula” when choosing. Though I cannot as of yet, prove it with a success story, I know my chances of meeting my true love are better today because of all I’ve learned. Though my business in this endeavor has yet to win me first prize, I’m hopeful that one day, the result I’m after will come to pass, and make all my efforts so far worthwhile. So I just can’t stop now.
I’ve got too much invested [in my love quest] to give up. If I do, then I waste the last three decades, and that amount of waste goes up the longer I stay the course. Ironically because of this growing investment, the longer I keep at it the more compelled I am to see it through either to success, or to my death. If not, then the hard-earned wisdom would all be for naught. All those relationships books, all the seminars, the singles club work, and all those rejections in Philly. All that would mean nothing if I stop [today]. People would remember me as the unattractive have-not who foolishly squandered his life and career pursuing women out of his league, when he had absolutely no hope of getting one. They’re already saying that about me and if I quit now, they’ll be saying it forever. That will be my legacy. I’ve just got to hang in there long enough to find that success that will justify all the means, and prove these people wrong. I’d rather they remember me as the admirable fellow who relentlessly followed his dream until he found it, the man who audaciously butted ahead in the pecking order, the one who dared to insist on perfection and then got it. This is the legacy I want. So there’s no turning back. Like a speeding train picking up more speed the longer it travels downhill, so too am I locked in this pursuit until either I crash, or the ground levels off when I reach my destination.
Yes, my chances are slim, but certainly not zero. As long as there’s that little bit of possibility, then my efforts are worthwhile.
