Welcome to the Next Level
by 
Eric Disco
One of the focuses here at ApproachAnxiety.com is learning to understand and deal with all feelings.
In our society, there is this idea that you should never feel bad. There are certain emotions and feelings which are unacceptable: Fear. Anxiety. Rejection. Hurt. Loss. Depression. Sadness. Weakness.
As most of you know, I never feel any of these. ;)
In actuality, we all feel these. No one goes through life without feeling hurt or loss.
The problem isn’t that you feel these things. The problems happen when you feel these things and think that you shouldn’t be feeling them. When pain is accompanied by non-acceptance, it leads to suffering. You struggle with it and wonder exactly what is wrong with you instead of accepting that this is a natural part of life.
The other day, I was talking with a client of mine. He’s one of my best clients and certainly one of the most ardent and dedicated. He was out there for a year and a half fighting the good fight.
And then something happened: Success.
He started to finally hook up with and get into relationships with women that he was approaching. It was exciting to see his breakthrough. For so long he’d been out there every day refining his skills, putting in the work. So to see him succeed was so inspiring.
It seemed he’d finally made it. But of course, just like any other human being–present company included–once we reach success, we want something else. Now that he was getting laid, the girls he was with just weren’t good enough in some way.
This is the human condition. It’s not bad to want more all the time. But when we are aware that getting what we want isn’t the end-all-be-all, we can start to accept a little bit more where we are and appreciate it, rather than endlessly searching for something to fill these unfillable holes.
But here was the interesting part about my client. He recently started to get down about things. He was getting uninspired and unmotivated. After some talking, we figured out why.
When you start approaching women, the rejections can be painful. You’ve never experienced this kind of rejection before. Even guys who are great with women will get rejected a lot more than guys who never take initiative at all. It comes with the territory.
You can get used to this kind of rejection. It still stings a bit. But if you do it enough, the pain is like burning your finger on a hot stove rather than a stab in the gut with a long knife. You ‘ouch’ it off, laugh if you have a friend there, and in a moment or two you’ve moved on.
If you have done a lot of approaching but haven’t yet started dating a lot of women, you may have gotten used to the initial rejection from approaches. But when you start dating, something different happens.
When you go out on a few dates with a girl, and then she rejects you, it’s different than getting rejected right at the very start. In a way, it’s more painful. She’s rejecting you more deeply because she knows you better.
Ouch. I wish I could tell you that as you get better with women, you no longer care. Yes, if you go out on a lot of dates, when you get rejected, it really doesn’t bother you as much. But if you’re really putting yourself out there, you will feel deep, intense and real pain. There’s no way around that.
But that’s a good thing. If you are feeling this kind of pain once in a while, it means that you are opening yourself up to feel something deeper. You’re going for the brass ring.
There is no way to find deep emotional fulfillment without opening yourself up in this way. You decide to take a risk with someone and see if it pays off. There’s no controlling other people, and that’s a beautiful thing. Sometimes it works out wonderfully. And other times, it leaves you a broken mess.
There are many things you can do to get better at relationships. And this to me is perhaps the best thing about getting good at meeting and dating women. I am no longer the pathetic, powerless, individual I used to be when it came to relationship management.
My first girlfriend in college described me as ‘clueless.’ Although I didn’t agree with her at the time, I really was clueless when it came to relationship management. Both her and I ended up very unhappy because of my lack of understanding.
There are a whole host of amazing things you can do to make you–and her–happier in relationships. But here’s the kicker: if you make yourself vulnerable, you still open yourself up to hurt, no matter how good you are.
It happens to all of us. And if it doesn’t happen to someone, he’s probably not putting himself out there and it’s doubtful whether he feels it deeply. Because those feelings for a girl–that’s the good stuff. When you are happy with her emotionally, those feelings can be a hundred times stronger than sex.
The next time you feel hurt, pain, or suffering, think about what you could have done differently. There’s always something you could have done better. But most of all, know that you are part of a very exclusive club, a club of people who risk big in order to earn the big prize. All these dating hardships we go through are a result of taking that risk.
The next time she breaks your heart, accept all of it and walk away. Breathe in every moment of it. Know that you’ve paid the price for taking action instead of waiting submissively. You walked outside and lived. And for a glorious moment, this is where it left you.
Welcome to the human condition.
One of the focuses here at approachanxiety.com is learning to understand and deal with all feelings. In our society, there is this idea that you should never feel bad. There are certain emotions and feelings which are unacceptable: Fear. Anxiety. Rejection. Hurt. Loss. Depression. Sadness. Weakness.
As most of you know, I never feel any of these. ;)
In actuality, we all feel these. No one goes through life without feeling hurt or loss.
The problem isn’t that you feel these things. The problem comes into play when you feel these things and think that you shouldn’t be feeling them. When pain is accompanied by non-acceptance, it leads to suffering. You struggle with it and wonder exactly what is wrong with you instead of accepting that this is a natural part of life.
The other day, I was talking with a client of mine. He’s one of my best clients and certainly one of the most ardent and dedicated. He was out there for a year and a half fighting the good fight. And then something happened: Success.
He started to finally hook up with and get into relationships with women that he was approaching. It was exciting to see his breakthrough. For so long he’d been out there every day refining his skills, putting in the work. So to see him succeed was so inspiring.
Of course, it seems he finally made it. But no, just like any other human being (including myself) once we reach success, we want something else. Now that he was getting laid, the girls he was with just weren’t good enough in some way.
This is the human condition.
Here’s the kicker. He recently started to get down about things. He was getting uninspired. After some talking, we figured out why.
When you start approaching women, the rejections can be painful. You’ve never experienced this kind of rejection before. Even guys who are great with women will get rejected way, way more than guys who never take initiative at all. It comes with the territory.
You can get used to this kind of rejection. It still stings a bit. But if you do it enough, the pain is like a burning your finger on a hot stove rather than a stab in the gut with a long knife. You ‘ouch’ it off, laugh if you have a friend there, and in a moment or two you’ve moved on.
Some guys who haven’t yet started dating women may have gotten used to that kind of rejection. But when they start dating, something different happens.
When you go out on a few dates with a girl, and THEN she rejects you, it’s different than getting rejected right at the very start. In a way, it’s more painful. She’s rejecting you more deeply because she knows you better.
Ouch. I wish I could tell you that as you get better with women, you no longer care. Yes, if you go out on a lot of dates, the ones that reject really don’t bother you as much.
If you’re really putting yourself out there, you will feel deep, intense and real pain. There’s no way around that.
But that’s a good thing. If you are feeling this kind of pain once in a while, it means that you are opening yourself up to feel something deeper. You’re going for the brass ring.
There is no way to find deep emotional fulfillment without opening yourself up in this way. You decide to take a risk with someone and see if it pays off. There’s no controlling other people, and that’s a beautiful thing. Sometimes it works out wonderfully. And other times, it leaves you a broken mess.
There are many things you can do to get better at relationships. And this to me is perhaps the best thing about getting good at meeting and dating women. I am no longer the pathetic, powerless, individual when it comes to relationship management. My first girlfriend in college described me as ‘clueless.’ Although I didn’t agree with her at the time, I really was clueless when it came to relationship management. Both her and I ended up very unhappy because of my lack of understanding.
There are a whole host of amazing things you can do to make you–and her–happier in relationships.
But here’s the kicker: if you make yourself vulnerable, you still open yourself up to hurt, no matter how good you are.
It happens to all of us. And if it doesn’t happen to someone, he’s probably not putting himself out there and it’s doubtful whether he feels it deeply.
And those feelings for a girl–that’s the good stuff.
The next time you feel hurt, pain, or suffering, think about what you could have done differently. There’s always something you could have done better. But most of all, know that you are part of a very exclusive club, a club of people who risk big in order to earn the big prize. All these dating hardships we go through are a result of taking that risk.
The next time she breaks your heart, accept all of it and walk away. Breathe in every moment of it. Know that you’ve paid the price for taking action instead of waiting submissively. You walked outside and lived. And for a glorious moment, this is where it left you.
Welcome to the human condition.
Posted in Acceptance | 
16 Comments »
Great article, Eric.
People need to stop trying to reject feelings and start accepting them and managing them. All the feelings, good and bad, are part of what makes us fully human.
Imagine a society where everybody was always happy. No sadness, no confrontation, no difficulty, no need for self-reflection. Nothing but smiles 24/7. A brave new world. How friggin awful and empty would that be. Most would agree it’s a very creepy and disturbing image. And yet this is precisely the direction that many people are going by ceaselessly and futilely rejecting negative feelings and the challenges of life, whether through legal or illegal drugs, or simply through a milquetoast existence.
I think it’s very important for men to make a distinction between being in love and wanting to be in love. A man who is legitimately in love is vulnerable, but as Eric points out in this article, it’s a state men should welcome. When those feelings are not reciprocated, a relationship cannot be called love. I call it need. If I had to make a list of the qualities a woman would have to have for me to love her, on top of that list would be that she would love me, too. I can admire women who don’t love me. I can think women who don’t love me are sexy. But I can love only a woman who loves me back. I think this distinction is very, very important. Men who don’t understand this feel pain when they are rejected by women who, on the whole, are not very important in their lives. These men need to stand in front of a mirror and convince themselves that they are valuable and worthy of true love, so when they meet women who don’t give them that love, these men can truly and honestly come to the conclusion that these women were not good enough for them. –Lee
This is like buddhism, without the buddhism. The most important without the irrelevant. This is great and really motivational.
So so true. Thank you Eric,
Zhelyazko
A couple years back, I read a dating expert’s reply to a reader worried about rejection. His example was a friend of his who’d been dumped by his girlfriend after ten years. The poor guy obviously felt really bad – the ultimate rejection came from someone who truly knew him well. Somehow, he managed to bounce off this and turn it into great self-confidence and being very desensitized to rejection.
This struck me as an extreme case of what this client of Eric’s experienced.
@KL, I get your point but sometimes acceptance just doesn’t work. Five years ago, I lost two years to depression then managed to catch up with my life, having ups and downs, being generally just fine. I knew what good and bad felt.
After years without meeting interesting women or caring enough, lots of good reading (hint, hint), a self confidence peak and a random stroke of luck, I finally caught up with that too last year, having turned 27, in a big way.
While she was literally my first everything, she wasn’t just a random floozy on which I’d gone through the motions. As luck would have it, she was truly a special individual that I just HAD to try and have.
We had an amazing connection, I loved the heck outta her- as Eric pointed out here, it truly felt incredible. Being the sensitive, clueless type alluded to in this article, this made me all the more vulnerable.
I lost her after three months, soon after she lost interest in a few days and I pussified myself trying to hold on (which made it even worse, as I found out in one of Eric’s columns posted days after the breakup).
Now, I am a rational person. Seven months later I’ve learnt all the lessons from this, tried to see all the light that could be in this situation, but there is still nothing I can tell myself that would make me accept it once and for all, chalk it up as experience and move on like nothing happened. It wasn’t a problem with the short lived stories that happened afterwards because, as Lee put it, they didn’t matter.
Still, this goes on in my mind and I have never felt this miserable, for that long, even during my two years of depression. Sure, being hurt comes with the territory. I’ll agree one has to have lows moments to feel the highs (better) and that all-round happiness is bullshit.
Me, I’d gladly have the reasonably lower highs and significantly more manageable lows of my previous self back if I could. It’s not only that acceptance isn’t happening, but I mostly feel like never leaving my (im)balance into someone’s hands again.
Eric, I wanted to thank you for putting this site out there. Everything you write resonates with me. I was also in the gifted program when I was younger (they called it Apex here in Canada), and I’m also a computer engineer. When I started learning about pickup, people would say things like “throw some C+F into your small talk” and it made me realize I had no idea how to even have small talk and that I didn’t just have approach anxiety I had a lot of social anxiety in general.
I’ve taken your challenge to approach one person every day but I’m still at the stage where I’m just happy to have a conversation with a random stranger every day even if it’s an old lady. I’m getting a lot more comfortable talking to people I don’t know now.
Now here’s my question. I’m a single dad and my daughter is *always* with me. I can’t afford a babysitter so going out to clubs and sarging is totally out of the question. I’m pretty much entirely restricted to day game. I have a decent amount of success with meeting women through Craigslist and taking them to McDonalds so my daughter can play on the jungle gym while we talk. This actually works pretty well because it forces you to focus entirely on conversation skills and in the context of needing a jungle gym nearby no-one has every accused me of being cheap or cheesy for meeting there. Getting laid this way isn’t really an issue for me. It happens often enough.
The problem is that I don’t want to use internet dating as a crutch. Do you (or any of the other readers of this site) have any tips for single dads trying to meet women in public? I have no problem starting innocent conversations anymore but when my daughter is with me the idea of physical escalation or more overt flirting kind of weirds me out and I can sense it is weirding out the women I’m talking to also. I’ve tried meeting single moms but they are usually so focused on their kids that it’s hard to get a good flow going because they keep breaking eye contact or spinning around in circles making sure their kid hasn’t run off out of their sight. This seems to reset any rapport and makes it really difficult to number close.
MJ,
Try Parents without Partners
The only reason why I read your website Eric, is because you are connected to what is important. Thanks.
Yes there will always be pain at some point, whether being rejected at the beginning or breaking up after years.
The only thing that makes it easier is knowing you can go out and meet more women.
Great Read Eric. As usual first class. I usually tend to be very guarded around women and very rarely open up to one whom I like. That’s what’s happening right now and I’m mindful of how much deeper to go because I don’t want to hurt too much in case things don’t turn out OK.
best,
PS – Could you give some pointers about how to behave when she admits she’s dating someone else but obviously has an attraction for you. I’m regrettably facing this right now and don’t know if I should play along or show my irritation.
I think it is very important to note that these negative emotions of fear and anxiety are only beneficial if you take action on them. Bad emotions without action eventually leads to depression.
I am having a lot of trouble with two sticking points :
1) If I have a great first date with a woman, including make-out, sometimes I will let a few days pass and then call her. But she has a habit of not answering the phone and letting it go to voicemail.
This puts me in the impossible situation of waiting for her to call back (again, since she does not pick up). This invariably makes be look ‘beta’ and the interaction ends.
Again, this is AFTER a first date where I got pretty far with kino and kissing.
Women who do a voicemail screening are denying themselves a lot too, since they are forcing virtually all men to become less attractive to them. But this does not help be either.
2) Asshole Game : There was a woman I was not that interested in, but she was interested in me big time. I thought I would experiment. She invited me over for a home-cooked meal that she worked hard for. We had a great evening. But I then decided to vanish for 2 weeks and call her only then. She was hurt that I vanished, and ended the relationship.
I guess I just don’t know how to be the aloof, uncaring type. Many say this is powerful if the woman is already attracted to you. But in this case, that sort of turned her off.
__________________________________
Thoughts?
With respect to point two,
asshole game is for assholes.
She goes through all that effort, you have a great time, then you vanish just to see what would happen?
Good for her.
@Darren–
Last post was harsher than I intended. But the point of not being a ‘nice guy’ is not to get pushed around…but generally women who don’t have serious insecurity problems don’t like being treated like yesterday’s laundry. If you’re not an asshole by nature, don’t try to be a dick to women just to see what happens…maybe you’ll get some insecure girls but it also drastically lowers your value as a guy.
Darren, theres a simple solution to point 1)……text :-)
Text : Texts can also be ignored, just like a voicemail is not answered.
I don’t see text as avoiding pitfalls that leaving a voicemail can create.
Darren: Yes, your right, texts can be ignored just like voicemail or phone calls. But a lot of people hate it when the phone rings, I personally never answer the phone, but I’ll reply to text. Texting is much cooler, lower pressure and more fun than phone calls. Give it a try and see what happens.
The other thing for you to consider is that your dates aren’t going THAT well. Obviously their going pretty well, with the touching and kissing and stuff. But I’ve kissed plenty of girls and never spoke to them again, kissing doesn’t mean anything. And if she isn’t calling you back she might have lost her attraction for you (or might be attracted to you but not feel connected to you).