This will be the final post on ApproachAnxiety.com.

I have never been one to take half measures.

When I first realized that my body would not cooperate with my will, I did not accept it. I wanted to speak to women. I wanted to walk across a room, open my mouth, and say what I wanted to say. But something inside me would seize up before I could do it.

My mind said go.

My body said no.

That contradiction became the central problem of my life.

So I made it my mission to solve it.

I spent years wrestling with approach anxiety. I went out constantly. I experimented. I failed. I studied what happened inside me before an approach, during an approach, and after an approach. I learned how fear moved through the body.

I learned what made it worse and what allowed me to take action.

At the same time, I decided I would write a book about it.

Nobody was talking about approach anxiety with the depth I believed it deserved. People talked about what to say to women. They talked about routines, attraction, confidence, status, and closing. But none of that mattered if a man could not make his feet move.

Approach anxiety was the gatekeeper.

It was the thing standing between thousands of men and the lives they wanted.

While I was writing that book, I felt deeply fulfilled.

I was meeting women. I was improving. I was coaching men. I was running a business. I was building something that I believed mattered.

Most importantly, I had a mission.

A man needs a mission.

He needs something difficult enough to demand his attention. Something he can move toward. Something that makes him proud when he looks back on the day, even if the day itself was painful.

For years, Approach Anxiety was that mission for me.

I published the book.

I was proud of it then, and I am still extremely proud of it now.

But after it was finished, something started to change.

I still went out. I still met women. I still had things to learn. There was still room to improve. But the larger purpose was gone.

I had solved the central problem.

I had written the book.

I had completed the mission.

And I did not understand how much of my emotional life had been built around that mission until it disappeared.

For the next few years, I went through periods of depression.

I kept moving, but I no longer knew what I was moving toward.

Game could still give me excitement. A beautiful woman could still give me validation. A successful night could still make me feel alive. But those feelings did not last.

The chase always reset itself.

There was always another woman.

There was always a more beautiful woman, a more challenging situation, or a woman who seemed to represent some final level of achievement.

But there is no final level.

There is no woman who ends the search.

There is no perfect relationship waiting at the end of enough approaches.

Then, a few years ago, I decided to set my sights on a different goal. I decided to redirect my energy to a different passion of mine.

I still speak to women sometimes. I have not become socially afraid. I have not forgotten everything I learned. I still contemplate relationships, attraction, and male and female dynamics. I still read about these subjects.

But game is no longer my mission.

It is no longer the organizing principle of my life.

Part of me was afraid to let it go.

I thought that if I stopped pursuing women, I might lose something essential. I worried that I would become weaker, duller, less alive. I thought I might look back and realize that I had abandoned the most exciting part of myself.

The opposite happened.

I have never felt better.

What Was Already There

During these few years, I experienced a level of fulfillment with a woman that I had never experienced before.

The strange part is that I had already been dating her for several years.

She did not suddenly become a different person.

The relationship did not magically become ideal.

What changed was the position the relationship occupied in my life.

When game was at the center of my life, part of me was always evaluating.

Could I do better?

Was there someone more beautiful? Someone more interesting?

Was I settling?

Was there another experience I had not yet had?

When mission is game, it becomes very difficult to settle.

Every relationship contains imperfections. If your central mission is to maximize your results with women, those imperfections begin to look like evidence that you should keep looking.

But once I stopped making women the centerpiece of my life, I became more capable of accepting the woman who was already in it.

Is it the ideal relationship?

No.

That is part of the point.

There is no ideal relationship.

There is no woman who will permanently eliminate uncertainty, frustration, temptation, boredom, incompatibility, or doubt.

When I stopped searching for perfection, I became more able to experience what was actually in front of me.

But I did not put her at the center of my life.

I found another mission.

That mission is creative. A new business I am developing. It challenges me. It consumes me. It gives me something to build and something to become.

It comes first.

The woman I am dating comes second.

That is not an insult to her. It is one of the reasons the relationship works.

She is not required to provide my life with meaning. She is not responsible for carrying the full weight of my identity, ambition, happiness, or self-respect.

She is an addition to my life.

An important addition, but still an addition.

I think she understands that.

In fact, that makes her want me more.

A woman should not be the center of a man’s life.

And that is the paradoxical problem with making game your mission. Even though game may appear to be about developing yourself, it can still make women the center of your life.

Your sense of progress revolves around women.

Your emotional state revolves around women.

Your victories and defeats revolve around women.

At the end of the day, you are asking women to measure the value of the work.

That creates an inherent instability.

I Am Not Turning Against Game

Some people will read this and think I have become opposed to everything I once taught.

I have not.

I believe every man who struggles with women should spend a few years of his life improving in this area.

Not a weekend.

Not three approaches followed by six months of theory.

A real period of committed effort.

If you cannot begin conversations with strangers, if you have low social confidence, or if fear controls your interactions, that will affect far more than your dating life.

The ability to start a conversation with a stranger is one of the foundations of social confidence.

Once you know that you can walk into an uncertain situation and create an interaction, the rest of social life becomes less mysterious.

You become more comfortable speaking up.

You become more capable of handling conflict.

You become less intimidated by status.

You stop treating other people as if they possess some authority that you do not.

This is also the foundation for solid relationships with women.

A man who believes his current woman is his only possible option will have difficulty acting confidently inside the relationship. He will tolerate things he should not tolerate. He will negotiate from fear. He will cling when he should be willing to walk away.

Knowing that you can meet someone else means you are staying because you choose to stay.

That is different from staying because you believe you have nowhere else to go.

So yes, spend the time.

Learn to approach.

Learn to flirt.

Learn to handle rejection.

Learn to manage attraction and relationships.

Learn how it feels when the beautiful woman you once believed was unattainable is lying naked in bed next to you with her arms wrapped around you.

Have the experiences.

Remove the mythology.

Prove to yourself that you can do it.

If you’re spent your life socially afraid, this is the most transformative thing you can do.

It can save you from entering a relationship from a position of desperation. It can save you from building his entire identity around the first woman who accepts you. It can save you from years of resentment, passivity, and fear.

But a mission can be necessary without being permanent.

Game may need to become your mission for a few years.

It does not need to remain your mission forever.

Diminishing Returns

During the first year or two of game, the returns are enormous.

You go from being unable to approach to approaching regularly.

You go from having no dates to having options.

You completely transform the way you carry yourself.

The next few years will still produce significant results.

But eventually, the returns begin to diminish.

Your game can always improve, but it may not change enough to justify the amount of time, energy and focus you continue pouring into it.

At a certain point, another thousand approaches will not transform you the way the first hundred did.

Another year of going out may not alter your options as much as a year spent changing your status in the world.

You could spend years refining conversations with women…

Or you could build a company.

You could move from being an anonymous employee to a leader in your field.

You could build wealth.

You could build noteriety.

You could create something people recognize.

You could become an accomplished musician, writer, artist, executive, athlete, or entrepreneur.

At a certain point, any of those changes could do more for your options with women than another five years of focused on game.

Likewise, if you have no game, any of those things will be a foundation on sand when it comes to dating and relationships with women.

Rollo once described fame plus game as the ultimate combination.

There is something important in that idea.

Game teaches you how to use the opportunities available to you.

But building a remarkable life creates more opportunities.

At some point, you have to build the empire.

The Hamster Wheel

Now that I’ve stopped focusing on game, I no longer look at every striking young woman and think, “It would be incredible to be with her.”

I have done that.

I have experienced beautiful women.

I have experienced the pursuit, the uncertainty, the validation, the sex, the intensity, and the moment when something that seemed impossible became real.

I am grateful for those experiences.

But I do not need to spend the rest of my life recreating them.

The chase is a hamster wheel with no completion date.

You can always find another woman to desire.

You can always imagine that the next woman will make you feel something permanently.

She will not.

No achievement does.

A business does not permanently fulfill you. Writing a book does not permanently fulfill you. A relationship does not permanently fulfill you. Nothing protects you forever from emptiness, uncertainty, age, loss, or death.

We all die in the end.

But while we’er here, some pursuits feel more like building.

Writing a book changed me.

Creating a business changed me.

Building something that did not exist before I began gives me a different kind of satisfaction than repeating the cycle of pursuit.

Game taught me courage.

It taught me to act while afraid.

It taught me that desire does not have to remain fantasy.

It gave me experiences I once thought were beyond me.

But it was a chapter.

It was not the entire book.

The Final Lesson

This is not the most important lesson ever published on this site.

It is simply the final one.

Spend as much time as necessary overcoming your fear.

Develop social confidence.

Learn to start conversations with women.

Learn how relationships work.

Become capable of walking away.

Become capable of choosing rather than begging to be chosen.

But once you reach a certain level, consider moving the center of your life somewhere else.

Do not stop climbing.

Change the mountain.

Find a challenge that asks more of you than another approach.

Build something.

Create something.

Take the confidence you developed through game and apply it to the part of your life that still frightens you.

The most surprising thing I learned is that shifting my focus away from women did not make my relationship worse.

It made it better.

It did not make my life smaller.

It made it larger.

It did not make me feel like I had lost myself.

It allowed me to meet the next version of myself.

Approach Anxiety began because I could not make my body do what my mind wanted it to do.

This site documents my attempt to close that distance.

Eventually, I learned to walk across the room.

Then I learned that there are other rooms.

There are other fears.

There are other missions.

There are other parts of life waiting for the same level of commitment.

That is where I am now.

I am still available for occasional private coaching, primarily for serious clients and executives who understand the value of focused, individual work. My availability is limited, and my rates are substantially higher than they were when coaching was a central part of my business.

My book gives a step-by-step approach I developed based on years of experimentation and coaching.

The site itself is complete.

It contains what I came here to say.

To everyone who read, commented, argued, approached, failed, returned, and kept going, thank you.

Now go build something.

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