Tom's Love Quest

Dear [Tess],

Things are great. It turned out to be a gorgeous sunny day, once the fog and gray clouds disappeared. I’m going out for a walk this afternoon. Will be thinking of you.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tess],

Good morning. I just woke up. It’s a gray, cold day outside. But it’s nice and warm in here.

I think about you too. You might be my dream girl.

I have some writing to do today and a little cleaning. All in all, it will be a typical day.

More later,
Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Yes, the reading has been most enjoyable, informative, and enlightening. I really do want to be knowledgeable about this stuff, and so lately I’ve been spending six to eight hours a day reading. I have a little ways to go in order to catch up to your knowledge. But these dialogues give me good reasons to read – so that I might understand your arguments and how to counter them.

Well, even if the actual numbers of abusive priests is small, the damage they can cause is quite a bit bigger, since each one has access to perhaps hundreds or even thousands of children in a parish.

Yes, as long as the nymphos are gratified most of the time when they feel the urge, I contend that they do get more pleasure from sex than those who barely desire it. This must be so if, as I believe, pleasure is indeed the result of gratifying desire. The more desire you have to gratify, the more potential pleasure you can reap. The less you have, then the less you’ll reap. Thus, as in your water scenario above, the person who gets thirsty every two days and then enjoys the quenching each time indeed gets more pleasure (or at least, more incidents of pleasure) in a two-week period than the person who thirsts only once during that same two-week period.

Now on a per-thirst-quenching incident basis, I agree with you. He may enjoy water as much as someone who must drink it more often. But he won’t enjoy it   as often. Per a given amount of time (say a month or a year), he’ll enjoy it fewer times. So I’d say that the person who must quench his thirst a hundred times a month, gets more enjoyment than the one who only does so ten times.

In light of the above, I’d also contend that reduced sex drive would indeed constitute reduced over all pleasure that could be gained from having sex. The less you want it, the less you’re going to seek it. Again, you may enjoy it immensely when you   do   seek it. But since a reduced drive would mean that you’d be compelled to seek it less often, you wouldn’t enjoy getting it as much, because you   wouldn’t   get it as much. This all boils down to the following question: Who enjoys sex more? The nymphomaniac who has 20 orgasms per month, or the frigid person who has just one orgasm per month? I believe that you know now, how I’d answer it.

I might also add that the person who wants it very little may feel that way because he or she   does not   get much pleasure from it. If he did get lots of enjoyment, it seems to me that he’d want it more. I knew a girl in the late 1990s who openly boasted that she was asexual. She never went with either man or woman, and didn’t want to, finding the whole sexual ritual disgusting. Granted, she’s at the far end of the continuum of frigidity. But she does illustrate that someone who desires sex very little would also get very little pleasure from it, and in fact, actively seeks to avoid such pleasures. Again, with less desire, there is less pleasure in gratifying it. And it’s also true that when little pleasure is felt when gratifying a particular desire, the desire itself lessens. After all, how long would you continue wanting ice cream if all you could find were sour curds?

However, many passions fuel rape, besides sex. In fact, often, sexual desire has nothing to do with a man’s desire to dominate a woman. Some guys like hurting women or disfiguring them so that no one wants them. We can’t blame sexual craving for much of the concealed violence against women that you mention. Much of this “wholesale rape and murder” grows out of a culture-wide bias against women, which still exists to some degree today even in this country. It’s rare that a man’s sheer love lust for a woman drives him to harm her. If it does, then it’s consistently easy to show that he has other mental problems besides simply thwarted sexual gratification. Blaming sexual craving for violent crimes against women, is like blaming guns for the high rates of murder. It makes [little] sense to do so.

Understood. But again, I must say that you may be attributing too much evil to the sex drive, whether we’re talking about you, me, or even someone who has been jailed for rape.

[...] Keep in mind that you had lots of excess alcohol and pot byproducts in your system in those days. Plus you probably weren’t eating well, not to mention the fact that you were severely depressed. You said often how irregular your sleeping patterns were. Well, given all that, your mind probably wasn’t functioning in a healthy manner.

Such a mix of conditions can produce confused responses to stimuli, false causalities, and exaggerated addictions. You might not have acted [so] problematically if you hadn’t been drinking, been eating a well-balanced diet, getting enough sleep on a regular basis, and not smoking pot. Who’s to say whether sexual craving [in and of itself] caused you to behave too irresponsibly? I bet it probably was not.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tess],

All is well here. What have you been thinking about where you and I are concerned? I think lots about us walking together and holding hands. Do you like kissing?

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tess],

[She said that as she slept last night, she awoke to find herself searching for my hand.]

Oh! You’re so sweet! I too have been searching for someone like you for a very long time. I have a blue robe with gray trim – just to help you fill in some of the blanks.

Two spoons? [She referred to the two of us fitting together in bed, just like two spoons would.] Yes. I hope with all my heart that it’s that way.

Sleep well. I’ll be thinking about you.

Tom Hesley

Hey sweetie.

I’m great. Just working on this speech I’m delivering in November, and did a little house cleaning this afternoon.

Yes, it would be wonderful to spend some time with you. I feel a very warm, sensitive and beautiful person when I read your letters.

Do you like holding hands?

Sleep well, and I’ll talk to you later.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Tess],

I like taking long walks and hikes, listening to music, reading, watching good movies, and doing repairs on the house.

My day’s been nice. I’ve written around 2000 words and am finishing up some laundry now.

*smile*

Take care, and talk to you later.

Thinking of you,
Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Well, I’d say the belief is a bit optimistic about life without a partner and how mindfulness meditation might make self-actualization without lovers more probable [in reference to Maslow's hierarchy of needs triangle]. Now I don’t read this sort of thing regularly. So I may be lacking much knowledge that this article takes for granted. However, from [my] layman’s perspective, there are problems with this article’s underlying premises. It relies on the existence of a   set point   for mood that remains essentially constant throughout life. It attempts to substantiate this by comparing the moods of people who win the lottery and those paralyzed by accidents, before the life-altering event, and one year afterwards. I was immediately suspicious however, because the supporting circumstances seem unrealistically contrived and impractical for the following reasons:

1. How for instance, would you know to study a particular person   before   such an event befell them, unless you had foreknowledge of its occurrence?
2. Since such life-altering events (LAEs) are quite rare, you’d have to study quite a few people for quite a long time just to find a few who experience such qualifying trauma — who would meet all the pre and post-event conditions of the study. This seems like it would be prohibitively costly because most people never encounter LAEs of this magnitude. So that would mean that you’d be conducting costly testing on people who’d never become qualified – impractical.
3. Assuming you had the money, you could study   everyone,   or at least, several million people, collecting data on their mood levels prior to LAEs. This would mean giving all of them MRI scans periodically, because you’d never know when an LAE would happen. And they wouldn’t be a useful candidate without closely preceding mood measurements to the LAE. It wouldn’t be as meaningful for example, to know someone’s mood levels five years prior to an accident as it would three or six months beforehand, because in that time the normal wear and tear of life can (and often does) drastically change [a person's] average mood. They might have been happy five years before, but six months ahead, been sad due to job loss, death in the family, or other cumulative losses. If we thought someone was chronically happy prior to an accident, but was actually chronically sad, this would seem to impact the quality of whatever conclusions we might draw, once they recovered from the LAE. Again, highly impractical.
4. But let’s say you managed all that, and had an efficient means to collect pre LAE data for enough people as often as you needed to collect it. It nonetheless would appear to be error-prone because the data themselves would be so vast. This would make them more ambiguous and thus difficult to interpret.

Well, let’s ignore these difficulties in squarely establishing this   set point   as a valid entity, and take as a given that the moods of said people one year later are roughly the same as they were before [...] good [... or ...] bad fortune befell them. Though the article does a haphazard job establishing this, I can buy it nonetheless for   most   LAEs. After all, its contention merely adds more weight to the notion that many philosophers have suspected for centuries; that seeking gratification is a vane effort, as humans don’t stay satisfied for very long. Gratify one desire, and another takes its place. The implication seems to be that we’re no better off after gratification than before. While this may be true of   many   of our desires, it is certainly not for all of them. Some desires, like the love lust, offer permanent benefit in exchange for keeping them gratified.

It’d be quite a stretch, as indicated, to think that one’s mood a year after finding true love would be identical to that before he found it, especially given the myriad studies (which we’ve discussed previously) that show clearly greater health and longevity among people with lovers as compared to loners. People in happy, healthy unions say they reap continual benefits of being in love   long after   the first year, and their average moods would seem to improve markedly throughout the life of the union. Even Dr. Phil, though he often advises clients not to actively seek ultimate happiness in love, writes in the acknowledgement section of his   Self Matters   book, “To my wife Robin, without whom I would not be living my best life.” The bulk of his accomplishments occurred long after his first year with Robin, and he obviously feels that he accomplished better things with her around than he would have alone. So you’d have to do   a lot   of eloquent empirical arguing to convince me that the benefits to the mood of finding true love would disappear entirely within the first year. This article invites us believe that the set point over all is generally not influenced by an LAE after a year since the LAE has [occurred]. However, to its credit, it does not specifically make this claim about the sad moods that result from love deprivation. It would have been nice to read the author’s thoughts on how meditation would impact melancholy, born of lacking love.

Are we to accept that finding true love has the same [temporary and] uplifting effects that winning the lottery does? Likewise, does the inability to find [true love] compare to that of lost use of the legs after an accident? It may. It may not. How would we know? There are no objective measures of   weight   to apply to LAEs though clearly, they do have differing severities. Again, the article avoids these problems by not mentioning true love at all. In fact, it doesn’t attempt to quantify the relative influences of LAEs, and seems to treat them as having the same impact on mood in the people studied. Again, what a stretch!

I believe that the pleasure of winning the lottery, even a notably big pot of a couple hundred million dollars, dwarfs that of finding one’s dream girl. Of course, individual preference drives this, because, unlike me, a person who loves money above true love would have a different take. It’s easy to imagine the gold-digging woman being more thrilled with a big bank account than with true love. For her, living on Easy Street would likely produce longer-term and higher mood upsurges than living poorly with abundant true love. But on the other hand, there are those who care nary about money, and seek only love. For these types, winning the lottery would not be so mood-elevating, while finding true love, would. It seems then that the personalities and deeply embedded desires of the individual (which are markedly diverse) would strongly influence just how changeable their average moods would be. And, how changeable their moods would be, would also be largely driven by the particular LAEs to which they’re subjected. Different people respond differently to different LAEs. Thus, I’m leery of inferring that our mood set points can be altered (or not) by the same LAEs. Indeed, what one person would consider a major LAE, another would take as a normal part of ho-hum living.

I’d also add in passing that a person’s prior history along with level of maturity would also influence how they’d respond to an LAE. A person for example, who’s previously learned to cope with other major losses such as partial and gradual loss of leg use due to multiple sclerosis, would probably appear to be less impacted a year afterward by a loss of the remaining leg function. In this case, the unwavering emotional set point put forth in the article could easily be illustrated. Yet if a fully sighted, previously happy teenage girl instantly loses all her eyesight in a car wreck, she may spend a decade or more feeling bad about the loss, and her overall mood would be lowered for much longer than a year. Indeed, study of similar cases reveals much long-lasting anger for their plights, which many spend the better parts of their remaining lives overcoming. Often they become alcoholics, chronically neurotic, and addicted to drugs, food, cigarettes, and numerous other vices, all of which would exert significant influence on future moods, and impact them for much longer than a year after the accident. So I have trouble believing that generally speaking, man’s moods don’t change much in response to LAEs, a premise upon which the whole remainder of the article relies.

Again though, let’s assume for the purposes of the discussion hereafter, that the set point has been irrefutably proven to exist, and further that it is not changed over the long term by the usual LAEs. Given these, the article next discusses how the set point can be influenced positively by mindfulness meditation. Perhaps. But several questions arise:

1. Would the Dali Lama’s seemingly perpetual good moods survive a transplant from his culture to ours? That is, if he came to live in this country, I wonder how long he’d continue to benefit from his advanced meditative skills, or if the benefit would be as clearly pronounced as it is now. Indeed, many easterners who permanently relocate here soon adopt most of the stress-related health problems that have come to characterize our culture [here in America]. The Dali Lama’s native culture may be more determinative of his heightened sense of well-being than his meditative skills.
2. Just how applicable are these techniques to counteracting the loneliness resulting from thwarted love needs gratification? Specifically, how well would they work against love lust? The [article] doesn’t address this. While the techniques appear to work well to reduce stress in the chronically stressed-out western worker, the article attributes no direct applicability of this technique specifically to   romantic   relationships (or coping with the lack of them). While it does say that the resulting mood elevation might help make relationships in general better,   it does not say which kinds of relationships. I’m skeptical of meditation’s long-term positive effects at eliminating a basic need – particularly one at level three or lower.
3. How widely applicable is this, particularly in so-called right-brained people? This article relies much on the subjective interpretations of MRI brain scan data. Deciphering these is even more of an art than reading X-Ray pictures (I found out just how “guessy” reading X-rays can be when I injured my wrist a year ago. But more about that another time). As we discussed in other posts, as I understand current technology, it lacks quantitative much less normalized ways of measuring precisely what’s being accomplished in the brain, how much is being accomplished, and precisely where that accomplishment is happening. Peoples’ brain physiology differs depending on genetics, the experiences they’ve had while growing up, and numerous other factors. Each brain is wired differently therefore. So a locus of activity in region A of person 1’s brain likely means something totally different than the same activity in the same region for person 2. Yet this article doesn’t account for these differences. It seems to treat brains rather generically, when it claims that people in chronically bad moods have more right-brain activity than left. After all, many people   normally   rely more on the right side of their brains for higher cognitive functions (particularly those involving analysis and decision-making). So who’s to say whether elevated activity in that area is due to a bad mood or healthy brain operations? To get around this problem, they might have included the less disputable blood pressure, heart rate, and galvanic skin response readings of the test subjects, to bolster their arguments for the stress-reducing effects of mindfulness meditation. But perhaps someone already did that in another article.
4. How practical would it be for westerners to make the seemingly-drastic life style changes required to benefit significantly? Again, to the article’s credit, it does say that the people who seem to benefit most, have to achieve a meditative skill comparable to concert violinists or Olympic divers. Very few people at large would ever be willing to work so hard and so long.

Well, as you can tell, I’m not overly impressed with this article. While I see the possibility of using mindfulness meditation to get temporary relief from thwarted desires for love, I’m not convinced that it could totally eliminate such a basic need. It treats the symptoms perhaps, but not the cause.

Tom Hesley

Dear [Mentat],

Yes, I did, and still do believe that the more we approach, the greater our chances of finding a true love are. However, when I adopted this overly simple strategy in 1990, I wasn’t expecting that I’d encounter such a high percentage of rejections. I mean, many dating books advise men to expect just one out of every one-hundred women to respond favorably. But with me, that hits-to-misses ratio was more like one out of every fifteen hundred. No joke.

Plus, I’d underestimated the cumulative negative impacts of too frequent rejection on my psyche, and came to understand that I was taking them too personally. Back then, rejection affected me as would a punch in the face, sending me reeling for weeks sometimes. I came to detest it and the women who would issue it. The more rejection I received, the angrier I got.

So I had to bow out of the game for a year or so in the mid 90s to learn to desensitize myself. To that end, I entered therapy, read several books on coping with rejection, and tried to savor life without women for a while. The therapy proved a success, though of course, I still don’t like rejection. But today, the female utterance of the word No, doesn’t produce the searing anxiety it used to. I don’t feel as slighted anymore, because I understand that ladies are as powerless to control who turns them on as I, and so could not be rightly blamed for finding me wanting.

While I came to take rejection less to heart and to stay calm when it happens, I also learned to stop underestimating its potential for triggering numerous other harmful effects. Even to the most self-assured person, romantic rejection has clear costs. It can:

• Counteract confidence,
• Promote neurosis, depression, and psychosis,
• Interfere with ability to concentrate,
• Sap motivation – even in unrelated areas of life such as work,
• Aggravate food, drug, and alcohol addictions,
• Create a false sense of futility regarding the achievability of one’s Big Dream,
• Encourage withdrawal from social circles – isolation,
• Lower immune system function,
• Increase at-rest stress levels, and
• Promote obsessive behaviors such as trying more than once to date a girl who’s already rejected us.

In short, too much rejection without sufficient time between each occurrence for healing jeopardizes one’s physical as well as mental well-being. So, while encountering rejection while pursuing a dream cannot be avoided, we should not subject ourselves to it needlessly since it is potentially harmful.

Some schools of thought equate rejection with progress, in the sense that the more ladies who turn us down, the closer we are to finding one who will at last accept us. “Let’s say you have a pool of 10,000 women,” my therapist said. “Your goal is to quickly rule out as many of those as you can so that you’ll reach the ones who like you faster.” The underlying assumption is that at least   someone   in that pool of 10,000 will in fact find us attractive. In this light, rejection appears as a holly grail, to be sought out rather than avoided. But as mentioned, it also stifles motivation to keep trying, which may in the end prove more debilitating than avoiding it in the first place.

As a means to the desired end of acceptance, we can easily abuse rejection by seeking it indiscriminately, just as we might overindulge in exercise on the way to a healthy, fit body. Work the body too hard without enough rest in between each workout, and you’ll wear out your joints, promote arthritis, and reduce the long-term benefits of training. That is, should you become arthritic, you’d not be able to continue to work out as vigorously, and some of the routines you simply would not be able to do, period. Clearly, the future effects of overdoing it in the present would limit the benefits you could gain in later years. And over the course of a lifetime, exercise improperly managed as a youth can actually cause reduced average fitness, just as the chronic dieter can wind up heavier than those who never dieted at all. Likewise, subject yourself to too many rapid-fire rejections without allowing sufficient time for reflection and mental repair, and you’ll probably experience some of the symptoms I’ve listed above. Too much rejection can exacerbate the very condition (loneliness) that you’re trying to eliminate. So at times, it’s wise to avoid it rather than repeatedly confronting it.

Plus, when meeting a number quota became the sole object, I found I was approaching too many of the wrong women. I suspected that they were wrong. But I approached them anyway, thinking that they’d eventually warm up. I tried ignoring body language. No matter if she turned away as I walked closer. I’d strike up a conversation anyhow. Why not? I’d seen so many men do this with eventual success that it seemed a prudent behavior, even though invariably it was received badly on the first attempt. One man described a woman’s protective shell that he said, must be penetrated. It really is a war, these pesky men say, because ladies intentionally play hard to get in order to test the man’s resolve. (Obviously, these men have little faith in her sincerity). Give up when she appears uninterested they caution, and you lose the battle because she’ll deem you of faint heart, and as such, undeserving of her trust. Take no as her final answer, and you’ll never enjoy a lovely beauty in your bed. Nonsense!

Yet for a time, I believed them and attempted to mimic the proverbial pit-bull that just doesn’t let go. Sometimes I talked to their backs, hoping that [the women would] eventually face me with intrigue. But that never happened. In fact, I felt all the more foolish, when they’d get up and leave, for having failed to pay head to their non verbally communicated wishes. [Ignoring their initial body language] made rejection a more shameful experience than it needed to be, and that made me come to fear it all the more.

Perhaps this technique works for some men, but not for me. What’s the point of approaching at all, if all you’re after is rejection? I came to expect rejection so much that a woman agreeing to dance with me left me stunned, as I was unprepared for a Yes response.

It’s bad to seek rejection just for rejection’s sake because one needs to have an eye toward any wisdom the experience might contain; wisdom that’s easy to miss if all you’re worried out is bumping the numbers. At times, I lost sight of the real goal (a beautiful lady saying yes), and actually felt a sense of accomplishment when I got a no. I reasoned that the rejections were evidence that at least I was getting out and trying, rather than sitting on my butt at home doing nothing. This was certainly true enough. After all, I wouldn’t have accrued the rejections by sitting around at home. In a sense, the rejections were indeed strong evidence that I was at least playing the game. No, I wasn’t   winning   the game. But since one must   play   the game in order to win, I found comfort in knowing that I was one step closer to winning by playing, and accruing the rejections.

This worked for a year or two. My pride in my monumental efforts to defy my fear helped offset the humiliations I encountered. It didn’t matter whether she said no or yes. Success at that point I measured by how often I could bring myself to ask, irrespective of how she responded. But soon, that sweet part of the bitter-sweet taste of rejection disappeared. No longer was it good enough just to get out there. No longer was I proud of being able to work up the courage to ask a woman to dance. And finally, no longer did I feel any sense of accomplishment by having gotten far enough to be told No. Getting rejections thus became child’s play. And then, once the thrill of victory over successfully making the attempt faded, only the humiliation remained. Thus, sustaining the motivation [to keep trying] grew difficult, particularly once I moved here to Altoona in late 2001. Even today, it’s not [so much] the fear of being rejected that keeps me from approaching more women. Rather, it’s the resignation that they’ll just say no anyway, so why bother?

Rejection is all the more embarrassing when one realizes that he could have gotten the same information without risking so much. Why jump head first into a pond to see how warm it is, when you could have just stuck your toe in and learned the same? Throughout the 1990s, I dismissed the validity of non verbal communication. For me, the toe test was insufficient and potentially inaccurate. It wasn’t good enough thus, for a woman to just give me a dirty look as I walked toward her. Simply looking at her and observing her reaction did not absolve my responsibility to genuinely move past my fear. Just reading body language didn’t count. No. I expected myself to actually   ask   her if she’d care to get acquainted. Of course, by this time in the typical scenario, she had already answered that several times with dirty looks, by moving away, and such, and was clearly frustrated that I paid no mind. So, not only did I get rejected, I also got many judgmental stares along with disparaging comments and unfavorable epithets. In this way, the bite of rejection felt much more painful than it might have, had I acted smarter and with more sensitivity.

To wrap this up then, the costs of focusing only on increasing the numbers of women approached, and not enough on improving the approach techniques, would be:

1. Pointless risk taking.
2. Needlessly frequent and severe rejections.   It’s one thing to simply be told no. But it’s quite another (and more painful thing) to be told no with the added message that she thinks you’re a fool, particularly when you have indeed acted as a fool.
3. Too many repeat rejections from the same woman.   When numbers are the only game, we often forget who we’ve already approached, particularly when approaching hundreds of women in a night like I used to do in Philly back in 2000. Sometimes, I’d ask the same woman three or four times a week for a dance, totally forgetting that she’d already turned me down. As I learned, this can lead to humiliating repeat rejections because women generally don’t forget a man who hits on them – at least not for several weeks anyhow. She’ll remember that she said no before, and wonder why he’s come back to try again so soon. Again, this can heighten the humiliation of a rejection, because she’ll surely regard him a fool hitting repeatedly. Genuine attraction doesn’t change much from week to week or year to year. That is, who we find utterly and completely enthralling today, we’ll also find that way tomorrow, next week, next year, or even next decade (unless of course, the person gets fat in the meantime). Likewise, he who turns a woman off today will do so, probably forever. So it makes no sense to repeatedly “check back” with her, hoping that her feelings have changed. To engage in this absurdity sends the message loud and clear, “Yes, I’m a big fat fool.”
4. Reputation. Women talk crassly about insensitive men, who appear to be on the make.
5. Missed opportunities to learn from rejection. If you don’t consider what happened and learn from it, you’ll be no more likely to get a Yes the next time. And who wants to keep repeating the same mistake? Take gamblers for example. They’re never content to just sit back and play the game. They’re constantly looking for ways to improve their odds of winning. The man seeking a mate should also be forever on the look-out for new angles.
6. Wasted resources   such as needless money spending. Often, guys buy ladies drinks and other gifts, even when they strongly suspect that she doesn’t like them. Yet they do so hoping to   melt her heart.   What a waste however. While such strategies might work on the so-called gold-digging lady, they will not on any woman whose only agenda item is to exchange love with a desirable man.
7. Less time for other pursuits. If one’s constantly out in the bars working the numbers, he’ll miss out on other, perhaps more enjoyable pastimes. To me in the 1990s, bars were a necessary evil one had to endure in order to meet women. I didn’t like them, but couldn’t think of any other places where so many available and desirable women congregated, and thus where my chances of finding a lover would be higher. I would have much rather spent that time attending ham radio club meetings, shopping for CDs and books, and tinkering with computers. However, these activities weren’t often frequented by sought-after women. Yet now that I’m aware of the futility of meeting someone in a bar, not to mention the fact that I don’t drink anymore, I find these days that I make very much more time for hobbies than ten years ago.
8. Too many dead-end relationships. When all we care about are the numbers, it’s easy to become entangled in a relationship with a lady who isn’t   the best.   That is to say, that without careful prior consideration of the woman’s desirability, we can end up approaching ladies who look great from afar but cease looking so good as we move closer. I’ve on occasion glanced women across the room that seemed perfect. Then I rushed over (before someone else would snag them) for a dance. Sometimes they’d say yes and next thing I knew, I’d be on the dance floor looking at her before me and wondering where her charm had gone that had been so plain but a few moments ago.

From the preceding list, it’s easy to glean the many practical advantages of working smarter while targeting more than just raising the sheer numbers of approaches:

1. Better Overall Mood. Less shame, less depression, less wasted time chasing relationships doomed to failure from the start, more liked in one’s social group, and more time to pursue fun hobbies.
2. Less Need for Therapy. This grows from item 1.
3. Improved Self Confidence and Self Esteem   due to less squandering of the self on needless rejections.
4. Improved chances of finding Miss Right. If one is not consumed in the wasteful efforts of needless repeated rejections and dead-end relationships, he can aim his resources where they’ll count more, and only subject himself to rejection from truly eligible women.
5. Fewer Wasted Resources. Follows from item 4 above.
6. Better Reputation. With a better ability to   read the situation,   a man is less likely to make unwelcome advances in which he goes needlessly too far. Women like knowing a guy is sensitive to their wishes, and will talk well of he who heeds them to others, even if they don’t consider him attractive.
7. More Time and Energy For Other Pursuits.   Questing for the right relationship can be exhausting because not only does it take considerable time and effort to troll for girls, but the rejections make the search doubly taxing. If a man is working smarter, and is thus presumably getting fewer rejections, this would seem to bias his overall experience in the quest to the positive and thus make it less draining on his psyche.
8. Better Effectiveness in Work and Career.  With fewer rejections, and a resulting better overall mood as mentioned in item 1, the man would concentrate better, be less irritable, and thus, do a better job at work. As a result, his coworkers would like and respect him more and likely push for promotions for him where applicable. This in turn would give him more resources (buying power), and as you know, women prefer richer men, even the ones who can’t accurately be typed as gold diggers.
9. Longer Lasting, Happier Relationships. If a man selects more eligible mates to begin with, he’ll be happier with his choices for longer periods. While it’s true that he won’t have as many dates since he’s choosier, those that do present themselves will be more completely fulfilling. As a result, he’ll
   A. Treat them better,
   B. Respect them more,
   C. Be less given to abusing them, and
   D. Be better able to accommodate any unusual proclivities in them.
   In short, he’ll be better equipped to accept them as they are and thus, won’t as likely seek to change them. Potential friction shrinks therefore, and the lady will feel more genuinely loved (because she would in fact be).
10. Enhanced Desirability. Given items 1, 3, 6, and 8 above, the man would be deemed more attractive, and so his chances of attracting the lady of his dreams would go up.

There, does that answer your question?

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Combating The Shame Of Rejection

Dear   [Mentat],

Well, you’ve beat at least two major addictions in your life: alcohol and snuff. Now that you’ve got years of sobriety, and know deeply the necessity not to waver, hopefully no woman or career will ever make consider drinking again.

But yes, listening to your better judgment, as I found out firsthand, must trump all other voices. My better judgment always told me to not date heavy women. But as you can well imagine, my mother, sisters, and female friends disagree with this vehemently. They say I’m shallow and short-sighted, offering that the type of beauty I seek is temporary and that a love based on it can never last. They argued that the ravages of aging affect less a person’s mind (their soul), than the body, and so they say that the energy of the spirit rather than the matter of the flesh is the more righteous quantity upon which a male should fixate. Of course I know this to be untrue today. But from the late 80s through 1997, their arguments, so cogently sounded by so many, had me doubting my better judgment, and from 1990 through 1992, overtly defying it.

But though the inner voice of better judgment rates quieter than those of the surrounding crowd raised in unison against it, it’s the one to which we must listen, for it punishes us most severely if we don’t. Yours did perhaps, by driving you to drink more. Mine did the minute I stripped off the clothing of those [curvy] women in the 90s, who I refer in that Lady-In-The-Park story as   dark ladies.   Their [obesity] turned my stomach. Poor [Hane]. I almost threw up the first time I saw her naked. I couldn’t contain my revulsion, which must have shown on my face, for she knew of my displeasure immediately and started to cry. She wondered aloud why I’d permitted our relationship to go so far if I thought her so detestable. I told her that I’d ignored my better judgment in order to do the “right” thing by her. I wanted to love her, and hoped that I’d find a compelling reason to, if I allowed myself to know her well.

She was a decent girl, and most helpful in taking me shopping, to doctors appointments and such. She never regarded me as too needy, and always respected me. Her attitude never betrayed any disappointment in me. She loved me. Hands down. Once she took me to a dinner with her coworkers and made frequent references as they conversed, to what she considered my greatest qualities. She was showing me off, bragging about dating me, and that felt most nice because to that point, I hadn’t experienced a woman so deeply proud to be with me; especially a fully-sighted one. Though my inner voice screamed to get away, I didn’t listen because [Hane] was so good in every other way. She only lacked   sexual desirability. Notice that I’m favoring the phrase   sexual attraction   now over   physical attraction   because the word   sexual   more accurately encompasses both the physical and mental aspects of this lust. To say that someone is   physically attractive   incorrectly implies that this attraction is   only   physical, when in fact it is so much more. As we’ve discussed, the attraction involves highly cognitive, evaluative mental processes that consider far more than [just] a woman’s shape or bodily attributes.

Nonetheless, in those times of blind ignorance in my life, I suspected that those women whose judgments drowned mine might be right. Perhaps sexual attraction really does mean but a trifle in the grand scheme of things. Perhaps it should mean nothing. All the good things that [Hane] was, they said I should revere, and were adamant and thus “right” in this. Why? Because had I rejected [Hane] upon realizing that she attracted me not, I’d have never seen her good. I’d have never allowed her to show me what a deeply abiding love from a lady other than a family member was like. Up until [Hane], I suspected such unbridled affection from an able-bodied female impossible, as no sighted woman had ever taken a serious interest in helping me except my mother, grandmothers, and sisters to a lesser degree. So [Hane's] love threw me into a rather large ego trip for some months, filling voids I hadn’t realized were even there.

She   wanted   to help, and used to get angry when I’d take busses or cabs instead of calling her for rides. She reacted oppositely to my handicap than most every other woman. Rather than shrugging me off, she embraced and respected me for having made it so far career wise, while contending with such an oppressive force.

I told her once about my eyes being extra sensitive from the cataract surgeries, and how unattractive I felt that the resultant squinting made me. But she disagreed, saying that the squints were cute. She enjoyed leading me around, which women since have said they did not like doing. They felt that I should have been ‘the leader’ as we went into restaurants, skating rinks, and golf courses. The fact that I often couldn’t see where I was going did not lessen their desires for a man who takes charge. They took no pity on me.

[Hane] didn’t care though. I think she relished being needed, as exemplified in our public outings where I’d walk sighted guide slightly behind her. In all my years of dating, I amassed a big list of laments of the treatments I received from sighted women. Yet none of those, not a single one [did Hane ever exhibit]. She never treated me badly, and seemed to know, without being told, what I needed from her to feel happy. Her spirit was pure even though her body was fat.

[Hane] made it easy to believe those women arguing for the mind instead of the body. But I would soon learn what to me then was unthinkable: Neither a woman’s good deeds nor her hardships make her romantically desirable. However, I’ll get into that another time.

At any rate, better judgment can seem brutal and cruel because it often instructs us to stay clear of people who seem on intellectual and emotional levels, to be so wonderful. We may think they’re wonderful. But if we don’t feel it in the heart and loins, they’re just not good enough. So avoid ‘em.

Tom Hesley

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