To me, that’s the best part of math: when pure blind reasoning gives rise to a result which seems like it should depend on “real world forces”. Here’s another one: a nobleman and a commoner can never breed together, unless one of them also breeds with someone else. (At least, provided some simple assumptions are true, which I’ll explain shortly) The surprising part is that this statement follows by pure abstract logic.

I won’t even nail down what exactly I mean by “noble”. I’ll just impose two simple conditions on nobility, and any definition of nobility you come up with, satisfying these two conditions, will work.

• Assumption: There is a set of “noble” people, who satisfy the following conditions…
  1. If you’re noble, and you have parents, then your parents are noble.
  2. If you’re noble, and you have children, then at least one of your children is noble.
• Definition: A “commoner” is someone who isn’t noble.
• Definition: A “player” is someone who has children by more than one partner.

(The most controversial part is the 2nd condition on nobility: that a nobleman has to have at least one noble child or no child at all. For some justification on that condition, see here and here.)

• Theorem: A noble and a commoner never breed together, unless one of them is a player.
• Proof: Suppose that a noble and a commoner have a child together. I’ll demonstrate one of them must be a player. Call the noble Chris and call the commoner Alex (I chose unisex names so I’m making no assumptions about the genders of either one). By Condition 2 about nobility, Chris has at least one noble child (the only other possibility would be no children at all, but we’re assuming at least one child of Chris and Alex). If this noble child of Chris has some other parent than Alex, then we’re done: we’ve proved that Chris is a player. But assume every noble child of Chris has Alex as the other parent. By Conditon 1 about nobility, since Alex is the parent of a noble, Alex is noble. But that contradicts the fact that Alex is a commoner. So indeed Chris’s royal child is by someone else and Chris is a player.

In fact, the proof actually shows something slightly stronger than the theorem: a commoner and a noble never breed together unless the noble is a player.

And I didn’t even have to consult any family law experts or fertility doctors or sociologists

FURTHER READING

Uncountably Many Bloodlines
Mathematical Royalty
A Provability Paradox
Abstract Systems of Royalty

By the very nature of the article, the reader may well be smarter than I am! The only real qualification I have on this matter is hindsight. So here’s the advice I’d give to my own ninth grade self, what I wish somebody had told me, the message that would have benefited me whether the messenger was Einstein himself or just another dumb teach.

School > Book-learning

Somehow this flew right over my head when I was a kid, and I suffered a lot because of it. I thought school was supposed to be a place of real scholarship. The truth is, there’s a certain basic skillset you need to navigate the world, and that’s about as far as the education part of school matters. Since you’re reading this, you’ve probably already got it. So focus on what’s really important: friendship, networking, and having fun.

If you’re an autodidact like me and want to teach yourself advanced quantum mechanics on the side, or write your own novel on the side, that’s awesome. But disentangle it from school. Video games aren’t really part of school; neither is teaching yourself Japanese or running your own business on the ‘net. School is about learning those fundamental basics (check) and about socializing with your peers.

People skills are a science of their own. When I was in high school, I could compute advanced integrals, but I couldn’t get a girlfriend. Looking back now, I wish I’d spent more time figuring out the latter! Trust me, when you go to college, there are a lot more integrals and you’ll meet them more easily, there’s no rush to get your first integral in high school.

Part of my problem was that I had built “being smart” into my personality, and I was scared to try hosting a party or asking a girl out or anything like that, because it was a totally different type of skillset and if I failed, I’d feel un-smart. That’s a big danger for smart people: fear of doing difficult new things, lest the “perfect record” be broken.

Teachers Are Human

Sure, some of them have become more machine now than man, twisted and evil, but somewhere beneath that dark shell of corrupt chalk-dust, there’s a human being. At one time, maybe they too were Smarter Than Their Teacher.

In the people skills game, the dumb and unreasonable teacher is a final boss, one of the most difficult challenges for you to test your skills against. Can you break through the cold jaded barrier and befriend the human within? Who knows, you might even be able to turn her from the dark side, get her to lighten up a bit and stop being such a prick.

You have nothing to prove

Of course I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was always struggling to beat people over the head with How Smart I Am. Again, all part of the Smart Personality™. Looking back now, that was kind of dickish of me. Just because I knew calculus and the math teacher didn’t, that was no reason to rub it in her face. No wonder we didn’t get along!

Intelligence isn’t something you need to prove to anybody, at least not ’til grad school. If you’re really a saint, you could go so far as to pretend to be impressed by your teacher. It would make their day like crazy, and if you kept it up, you could even influence them to become a better educator permanently.

Here’s an interesting psychological experiment. A teacher, with an ordinary class, pretended that the class was gifted. Sure enough, the class excelled, all the students performing as if it really were the gifted class. When the teacher began treating students like they were intelligent, the students somehow performed better accordingly! Thing is, though, this goes both ways. Even if your teacher is dumb, try your best to do the experiment, act like they’re the greatest teacher in the world. Watch as a more gifted instructor emerges, as if by magic!

FURTHER READING

Red Pills and Blue Pills
Become More Intelligent by Doing New Things
My Home School Story

If you’re a Japanese nobleman in the Heian era and a certain noblewoman catches your eye, here’s how you go about courting her:

• Get into her room at night.
• Do the horizontal dance together.
• Make sure the servants hear you going at it. They are your witnesses.
• Share some manjuu (sweet dumplings) and exchange love letters.
• Repeat the process for three nights in a row.
• Congratulations! You’re married

There are obvious reasons, I don’t really need to point them out, why this would never work out in today’s society. Heian marriage does have a lot of things going for it, though.

When Lord Genji took his numerous wives, it was a more passionate, spontaneous, and therefore loving affair. Missing were the legalism, the commercialism, the consumerism with which we bind marriage in the modern West. The act of wedding a noblewoman was an act of passion and love. Here in the west, it’s an act of signing documents, often accompanied by lots of traditional ceremony. The night after all that exhausting ceremony, newlyweds are lucky if they have enough energy to actually consummate it.

Neither was marriage so life-changing back then. Ain’t no samurai gonna be walled in by no white picket fence! A wife was really more of what we’d call a steady girlfriend. You can imagine how much easier that could be on the sanity of both the lord and his lady. Cohabitation was unnecessary, indeed would be impractical for the young prince busy adventuring around Japan.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of Heian Marriage over the western institution: internal consistency. You see, as much as we in the 21st century make a big deal about lifetime marriage and “’til death do us part”, divorce and separation are actually quite common. The U.S. legal system features a no-fault divorce system which could have come right out of Murasaki’s quill. Or rather, Murasaki’s version would be clean of the guilt and shame and feelings of failure we heap on our divorcees. And clean of the lawsuits, custody battles, alimony and legal fees.

A society can go for a passionate, spontaneous marriage system like the one in ancient Japan. Or it can go for the long-term, the golden anniversary, the white-picket-fences. But whichever way it goes, consistency is crucial. The solemn and expensive vows of Western marriage ring hollow when western marriage is in practice no more stable than Genji’s lascivious adventures.

Incidentally, you can still practice Heian marriage even if you’re not a shogun prince. You can replace the manjuu with donuts, and the servants with neighbors whom you keep awake all night Whether you’re really officially married, or just boyfriend-girlfriend, a three-night “Heian ceremony” can be a lot of fun

FURTHER READING

Leadership in Relationships
10 Metaphors for Love
Sex Before Marriage
Hashigo

Love is……

……A Thrill Ride. Sharing experiences with another person adds an element of non-control into the picture. Suddenly you’ve got a “better half” who you can never completely predict. One reason it’s so great to be together with a fellow human being is because humans are ever-changing creatures. I have no idea how my partner will change, nor does she know how I will. That makes it a kind of thrill ride. The best affairs fulfill our thirst for drama and spice: the ideal relationship of constant hugs and smiles, which some people try to portray to the outside world as in the movie Revolutionary Road, is a sham. A relationship without its ups and downs is like a flat roller coaster. But when two people share the full spectrum of emotions with each other, a roller coaster of ecstasy and soap opera, a new and higher level of intimacy is achieved.

……A Fine wine. While a typical fling might be very hot and passionate at first, it always seems to cool down. But true love should age like wine, growing in subtle intensity. Fond memories accumulate, and not just the lovey-dovey kind, but also the excited forbidden kind. This is the couple who seems drunk on each other, the married couple who still can’t keep their hands off each other.

……A Garden. Tend it and watch it blossom. Then let it nourish you and its fruits revive your soul. Lie down in the flowers in the warmth of the sun. Replant the seeds of love so that it may replenish itself and grow more full as the seasons pass. Be vigilant of weeds and uproot them early by maintaining an open and direct dialogue together. Openness is crucial in a loving relationship; the light which streams in will strengthen the garden.

……A Battlefield. I like to fight other guys over my girl. God knows, she’s cute enough there’s no end to guys hitting on her. But I wouldn’t have it any other way. My girlfriend is the jealous type, and whenever another girl so much as smiles at me, I’m sure to get a tight possessive hug The artillery and shrapnel of the flirting world keeps a good relationship sharp and wards off complacency. A common misconception is that this conflict can be stopped by exchanging two gold rings. Nonsense: all that does is up the stakes of war!

……The Air. How easily we can take it for granted when we have it! Lose it and you’ll feel it fast. We human beings are hard-coded to need companionship and affection with a kind of lunatic urgency. It’s more important than any other thing in the confines of the world: just as a pile of gold would do you no good if you couldn’t breathe, so too do all the luxuries of life crumble to dust when the energy of love is removed. Breathe love in deeply and let it flow through every corner of your body and heart. Like the Tibetan monks meditate upon their breath, make yourself appreciate each moment together.

……An Experiment. When two hearts join, there’s no knowing what the outcome will be. And yet like a scientist devoted to truth and knowledge, lovers thrill in the act of the experiment regardless of the results. As in science, there is no “wrong result”. Quite the opposite, the most awesome results are the very ones we least expect. It is when our lover surprises us and catches us off guard that new heights of love are achieved.

……A Destroyer. A really good love affair will annihilate something about the lover’s prior self. Maybe new boundaries will be penetrated, maybe certain beliefs and views will change. The very best encounters will leave one a completely different person, obliterate the old self completely. Sometimes a dart from Cupid is exactly what we need to nudge us off the wrong path in life, to jolt us out of a rut, force us to take back control from the autopilot. In order to fall in love, one must be ready (deep down) to let go of things and put some faith in fate: to bid farewell and release the old and open one’s arms to the new.

……Life. All the important parts of life resonate lovingly, whether for a soulmate or for friends or even just for a particularly dear hobby. No man makes a meaningful impact upon the world without some kind of deeper emotional tug at his heartstrings. Lukewarm emotions just do not carry enough momentum or energy to do anything more than make some temporary noise. Of course, even besides these deeper matters, there’s the obvious direct physical connection between intimacy and the very creation of life. No-one loves like a newborn baby!

……Autumn. With passion, every part of life bursts aflame with color and light and energy and presence. Autumn is the season of dusk and twilight, just as the throes of love exist in that half-awake, half-dreaming state of magic when the rest of the world gets its volume turned way down. And when at last love smolders down and dies, its passage ushers in a season of wintry cold and gloom. And yet given the power to avoid the winter and dwell forever in Summer, life would be deprived of some of its beauty and joy: therefore we choose to open our hearts to our lovers, even knowing that it might hurt.

……An Adventure. A great road trip to new and unexplored feelings and experiences, fraught perhaps with perils and conflicts. In a story, the adventure is the whole reason for the hero’s being, it’s the whole reason for the whole story-world’s existence. So too does the Higher Emotion justify all the toil and tedium of life. In a certain sense, every adventure is a metaphor for, every story a monument to, love. It is, at the very core, what separates the novel from a lifeless narration of events, and what makes our lives worth reading.

FURTHER READING

10 Metaphors For Life
10 Metaphors For Death
Variations On “I Love You”
Romance Movie Cliches
Being Open

Canned Material

In the seduction community, a lot of guys memorize canned materials, little routines calculated in advance to have maximum conversational power, to be whipped out whenever you get lost for words. I strongly discourage canned material. When I was a pickup artist, I did try canned material. Some guys can really pull it off. But generally it just made me seem creepy. It would’ve been better if I’d stood there with a dumb look on my face. Even if I could pull it off, it wouldn’t really accomplish the goals I was after. There would be no real connection with people: at very best, I’d still be a computer, just one which passes the Turing Test The best metaphor is that canned material is like a “mask”, behind which its user hides and cowers. The way I see it, life is so short, I want to spend the time I have bearing my face openly to the world, living a real life and not an illusion.

But we’re back exactly where we started. The problem is a loss for words, and all I’ve done is rule out one possible solution. So I asked myself, what’s the alternative to canned material, which will give me the words I need when I need them, and yet still allow me to connect with people openly and honestly? Me, I’d overcome my conversational shyness long ago. I just wasn’t sure how I’d done it. I thought long and hard about the events which had transpired in the past few years. What had cleansed the figurative soot off my tongue and freed my voice? And then I realized what it was, in an “Aha!” moment after which I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it for so long.

The Magic Bullet: Article-Writing

A few years back, I couldn’t even hold a conversation with the old ladies at my parents’ church. Nowadays, conversation flows easily and effortlessly off my tongue. How did I make that change? I wrote hundreds of articles right here at Xamuel.com. At first, I was my only reader, but as I wrote more articles, more and more visitors came. Although I’d always thought of myself as an okay writer, I gradually became aware that my writing was improving with practice. What I didn’t realize for a long time, though, was that my conversation skills were also increasing.

When I write an article, I take something that’s been on my mind, I research it, I organize it and make it coherent, I ponder it and meditate upon it, finally I broadcast it to the world at large. Throughout that journey, it goes from a rambling wisp of an idea, into something very much concrete and fleshed-out. And then, any time I want, I can use that as a starting point for conversation. It’s not that I’m carefully memorizing my own articles so I can whip them out at just the right calculated moment; matter of fact, I’ve written so many now, sometimes I’ll notice an article in my own archives and be like, “oh yeah, I wrote that, didn’t I!” There’s no need to memorize anything. The ideas I write about originated from my own mind in the first place: I own them. But as I write, the ideas are ironed out and refined, and they’re programmed into my unconscious mind.

It’s like this. If you go skiing, that becomes something you can whip out in a conversation. Same thing if you visit Japan, or if you meet a celebrity, or learn the guitar, read a famous novel, and so on. It’s not canned material; it’s not like the guitarist is scheming to herself, “I’ll impress them with my knowledge of electric vs. acoustic.” These experiences become a part of your personality, and you “own” them. You don’t have to consciously search for them when you’re talking to friends; your subconscious mind suggests them to you with no effort on your own part. Before you know it, you realize you’ve been having a close, heartfelt talk for two hours with someone you just met! The same exact thing happens when you write an article. The difference is, you can write an article every single day, if you want. You gain the same kind of conversational fuel for your subconscious mind, but it takes only an hour or so for an article, versus dozens of hours and thousands of dollars to learn how to ski.

“I hear and I forget;
I see and I remember;
I write and I understand.” -Chinese proverb

FURTHER READING

Become More Intelligent by Doing New Things
Three Ways to Be More Present
Reality Expansion
Being Open
30 Day Article-A-Day Challenge Complete!

* Tell her you love her and can’t live without her. If this doesn’t work right away, it’s because she’s not sufficiently convinced, so spend the rest of the movie repeating it ad nauseum.

* If her fiance is a wealthy gentleman, immediately discard all your worldly possessions and become a penniless pauper. Chicks engaged to aristocrats dig paupers.

* If she’s making out with someone (possibly even her boyfriend or fiance), go defend her honor. He’s obviously forcing her, and she’ll love you for stopping them.

* Save the world together. (Optionally replace “world” with “galaxy”, “universe”, or “Christmas”)

* Go way out of your way to help her and assist her. If you’re not flexing your influence to give her massive undeserved favors, you’re not doing enough.

* Rescue her from an evil villain. If she hasn’t been kidnapped yet, no sweat, it’s inevitable.

* Call out her name really loud somewhere in the wilderness.

* If she happens to be a spy working for one country, become a spy working for that country’s #1 enemy, or at the very least for a competing spy agency.

* If she’s a nurse (especially during World War II), do whatever it takes to become a casualty in her hospital.

* If you’re both in high school, buy beer for the party. Unfortunately this tactic is of limited value. In Hollywood, it’s easier for a teenager to get a time machine than a beer.

* Whatever it takes, whatever extremes you must go to, make her parents hate your guts. Once they want you dead, the girl is guaranteed.

* Be Colin Firth.

* If you’re having trouble convincing her that you really do love her and can’t live without her, try announcing it dramatically in front of all her friends, co-workers and family.

* If everything else fails, break off all contact with her but continue to obsess about her for twenty years. Eventually she’ll wander back into your life and as soon as she sees you again, she’ll fall deeply in love.

* Variation on the previous one: break off contact and continue to quietly obsess over her until she gets crippled/maimed/disfigured/blinded in a horrible accident. As your competition abandons her, you can swoop in for the easy seduction.

* Befriend her children. Don’t worry, she won’t suspect you’re a pedophile, instead she’ll see what a great father figure you are and soon you’ll be hearing wedding bells.

* The paradox of success: when you finally achieve huge success, she’ll come running into your arms. But when her husband or fiance achieves huge success, it’ll estrange them and she’ll come running to you.

* After losing contact with her, scour the world to find her. Sail the seven seas hunting her down. You’ll eventually find her in Paris, just in time to rescue her from her previous lover who’s gone crazy. The two of you will live happily ever after.

* Make sure her first impression of you is as terrible as possible. When she learns how mistaken she was, she’ll jump lovingly into your arms.

* Stalk her. No, really, full-out stalk her, it’s not creepy at all when it’s in a movie.

* Relate a tear-filled story to total strangers about how you lost her. Include plenty of detailed flashbacks. Around the end of the story, she’ll come running back into your arms.

* Be her invisible benefactor. Eventually she’ll figure out it’s you, and nothing opens a girl’s legs faster than being the recipient of charity.

* Die dramatically in front of her. She’ll realize she loved you all along, and as she kisses you, the power of love will bring you back to life.

* At a party or dance, stare creepily across the room at her for five minutes. You’ll know you’re doing it right when the rest of the room blurs out of focus.

* If none of this advice is working yet, it’s because you aren’t enough of a nice guy. Try taking yoga classes or something.

* Did I mention you should definitely tell her you love her and can’t live without her?

The most subtle and insidious forms of cruelty actually masquerade as selflessness. Wise-men have long been aware of these cruelforms, and the ancient literature refers to them as “mind games”. As in, “avoid that girl, she’s full of wicked mind games”. Most of us are guilty of these from time to time, often without even conscious awareness. The most common example is resigned agreement: when I’m sick of arguing about something so I just say “fine, whatever, you win”, or, with a dramatic sigh, “ohkay, we can watch that movie.” I whip out these cruel verses and justify them as being selfless, but at a very deep level I know they’re the exact opposite, that they are torture.

By the same token, the kindest thing you can do is often the selfish thing.

In a loving relationship, kindness and cruelty are actually easier to manage than we often make them, and that’s because of one fact which changes the whole equation. In such a relationship, kindness toward your partner is kindness toward yourself, and likewise with cruelty. There is no distinction between the two. It’s the old “where do you wanna eat lunch, I dunno where do you wanna eat lunch” paradox: each partner really just wants the happiness of the other. When a girl really loves me, my happiness becomes her happiness, and visa versa. When I am happy, she is happy, and the net change is pure joy; when I surrender and become a martyr (letting my pain body take over), she shares my suffering and the net change is pure misery.

Even a white lie can be cruel. Rather than say you like a certain shirt that you actually hate, come right out and let your partner know how you feel. Use tact, but don’t lie. In the same way that a couple shares joy and suffering, when you lie to your partner, it’s like you’re lying to yourself. In this example, once the shirt gets ditched and replaced with something more appealing, the relationship becomes energized as new attraction blooms. If things go well, soon neither of you will be wearing any shirt

What made me start thinking about these matters was an article from Steve Pavlina about ways to increase one’s consciousness. A lot of them were frankly predictable and I was almost ready to navigate away from the article, when the kindness/cruelty example came and caught me by surprise. I’d never thought of these before in the context of raising consciousness, but the more I think about it, the more I agree with Steve. The types of passive aggressive cruelty I’m discussing have a common thread: hiding the truth. Of course that’s gonna lower my consciousness; if I tell my girlfriend I wanna watch some movie when I’d really prefer to gouge out my own eyeballs, I may as well drill flashcards that say “1+1=3″. More overt forms of cruelty, such as waterboarding, give rise to self-justification, which again is just a fancy word for “shutting your eyes and clocking the heck out”. On the bright side, kindness is about sharing truth, and when we’re kind, we can better accept ourselves for who we are, so consciousness goes up.

Now I know you want me to wrap this article up with some witty ending, but to be absolutely honest with you, I really don’t feel like it. Not tonight. Let’s listen to some music instead. I know you appreciate my honesty here since you don’t really want me to strain to make a witty ending and be bitter the rest of the night

WHAT IS MARRIAGE ANYWAY?

Those who would trap our genitals in rusty metallic cages call upon Christianity and the Bible to justify their position, but this is entirely misguided. Marriage as we know it today (in the U.S. and many other countries) is a secular institution, a contract with the state, wholly absent from the bible. Getting married means signing paperwork before an agent of the state. Then you get some tax breaks, hospital visitation rights, and all the traps and pitfalls of the modern family court. None of this has any basis in the Bible at all. Tying the knot is not required in order to live together, nor does living together require marriage. The same goes for having children and being in love. These things– living together, having children, being in love– are the core of a healthy family (in the modern conception, which is itself somewhat arbitrary). Being married just doesn’t even enter the picture.

As for the modern wedding ceremony, it’s great fun and excitement, but it has no legal connection to marriage, to living together, to having children, or to being in love. Any couple with the desire and the money, can have a wedding ceremony, and if they just skip the paperwork, it doesn’t even carry any legal meaning. It’s also rather expensive. Did you ever stop and wonder how churches get away with charging for wedding ceremonies? If it’s really God’s Holy Will that every couple walks down an aisle to the tune of “here comes the bride”, then shouldn’t His ordained ministers be charitable enough to let us simply go through the required motions without being charged for it? If the U.S. Republican Party were serious about encouraging holy matrimony, they’d subsidize the ceremony, not some ridiculous abstinence propaganda.

Those who, in God’s name, command us to abstain until signing some paperwork with the State of California– they are insulting their own god, belittling and mocking him. As if the omnipotent creator of the universe gave a damn about your paperwork with the State of California. Or any other state or institution.

It’s instructive to look at the noble wedding rites of Heian-era Japan. In the Heian era, one respectable way to marry a girl was to enter her room and make love with her. This had to be done three nights in a row, and you had to make sure someone in the house heard the two of you getting it on. Then you’d exchange love letters and eat some special food together, and you’re married. Once you admit the existence of this type of wedding, the whole idea of “no sex until marriage” collapses like the unwieldy abomination of control and suppression that it is.

IS SEX SPECIAL?

One of the arguments of the pro-abstinence crowd is that sex is special. That you should “save yourself until you’ve found someone you’ll spend your life with”. Recognize this as the huge pile of lies that it is. If this were true, woe to any unfortunate rape victims! The truth is, sleeping with someone is as special as you make it. Before I met my girlfriend, I had some casual partners and there was nothing special about our flings. I mean, nothing special in the sense of angels weeping for joy for the seeds o’ true love are sewn and two lives are forever joined in holy bliss and blah blah blah.

Sex can be special if you want it to be. There’s no connection to whether or not you’ve filed paperwork with city hall. Nowhere on a marriage license does it say, “your sexual relationship is now licensed to be special.” Neither is there some magic limit, like you only have so many magic points to cast your “special love” spell.

When you do love someone, making love plays an integral part in that. The formula is like this. Sleeping around does not require love, however, love (at least romantic love) does require sex. Some Christians believe it’s better for a couple to live a sexless marriage than to divorce, as if by just tolerating it somehow, they’re being “good Christians”. Sexless marriage is just a fancy living arrangement.

When the two are combined– love and lovemaking– they enhance each other cyclically. Better love inspires better sexual performance, which in turn inspires better love. Emotions run absolutely wild and both parties feel beloved, accepted, fulfilled, protected. A good couple falls more and more in love with each other all the time, and if that’s not the case then why would you even think about getting married?

SEX IS GOOD

Sexuality is a good, healthy part of being alive, and if you’re not getting laid regularly, it’s going to physically mess with your brain chemistry. I know, because I didn’t become fully sexually active until I was 23. I was raised in exactly the sort of household that votes power to men like Bush, and I was raised with extremely unhealthy ideas about sex. Throughout my childhood, it was an evil thing and a filthy thing. Something bad men do to innocent girls against the girls’ will. I was in great danger of living a life of solitude, victimized by the uncaring greedy lies of a modern church industry. By the time I was on my own, I knew enough to know that was all nonsense, and I saw that normal healthy people everywhere were sexually active. And I envied them. But the damage was done and I was royally fucked (or should I say, royally fuck-proofed). Fortunately I realized that whatever power I have, is power right now, that the past is the past and there’s no use being a victim. It was a grueling ordeal, but I was eventually able to heal the damage my parents dealt me and get a normal sexlife. I really feel for all the guys who weren’t so present-minded or determined.

This world is a place of wonder, and our purpose here is to enjoy the abundance of creation. If the Christian God is real, then this universe is a gift from him to us, and he wants us to enjoy every last part of it. Christians get their heads full of absurd ideas like, this world is a “screening system” to “screen out the bad guys”. That this life is a hell that you have to endure and follow certain rules to avoid another, worse hell. If you actually read the Bible, Jesus explicitly tells his followers that they are saved by grace. That is, according to the Christian philosophy (which just about zero modern “Christians” know or care about), we’re saved (from hell) by the sheer generosity and compassion of the creator, and our behavior has absolutely nothing to do with it. That’s because, if an omnipotent creator God is real, then he’s not some petty tyrant spying on our underpants!

Since our purpose in this world is to enjoy fun and pleasure (in Christian-ese: to “make a joyful noise unto the lord”), let’s kick off the chastity belts and get down to some noisy, kinky, good healthy fun!

FURTHER READING

If you want to read more details about how I went from sheltered eunuch to sexworthy guy, check out My Time In The Seduction Community.

For some alternative ways to express your love to that special someone, read Variations Of “I Love You”.

Read about the difference between what we want on the surface and what we really want deep down. Deep Desires And Surface Desires.

For me, the evolution took four stages: eunuch, creep, dancing monkey, and finally, sexworthy man. These stages are pretty common among men who join the community from a place of cluelessness about girls. This article is about the third stage, the so-called Dancing Monkey.

In the pickup artist lingo, a dancing monkey is a man who does lots of high-energy tactics to get attention and get responses. Dancing monkeys are generally entertaining, but not fwckable: a girl might laugh at the monkey, even dance or make out with him, but at the end of the night, she probably won’t go to his apartment.

In the club, the ‘Monkey bounces all over the place, grabs girls, dances like a douchebag, and so on. Outside the club, he’s tryhard. In my case, I spoke in perpetual hyperbola, making up transparent non sequiters at every opportunity. For example, someone brings up The Beatles, I’d say: “Oh yeah, I used to be their lead singer. Wrote all their best songs, you know!” The point wasn’t to deceive– people could generally tell I wasn’t seriously running for president– the point was to get attention and responses. It did a great job of that, but it did a lousy job of making people like me for who I am. And a lousy job of getting girls to sleep with me, as well.

I was basically projecting a false mask all the time. The mask of a really high-energy entertainer. If that’s your real personality, it can work. In my case, it wasn’t my real personality, and so no matter how carefully I tried it, people would always get a creepy vibe between laughing. They were laughing at me instead of laughing with me, because the image I was sending out was incongruent with my core self. (For a lot more on showing your core self, read my awesome article titled, “Openness“)

The Urban Dictionary defines a dancing monkey as “Someone who does your bidding, a puppet or lackey.” This is less specific than the Community definition, but it still applies pretty well. When I was in that stage, I was “doing peoples’ bidding” just like a court jester, juggling my balls to make people laugh and distract them from things. I thought I was being cool, but really I was just being a tool. In the night clubs, other guys (“AMOGs”) would even use me, or “tool me”. Like when a guy would say “hey go dance with that girl there”, it wasn’t really because he thought I’d do well with her, but because he himself would look cool by getting me to entertain the group.

When I met my current girlfriend– shortly after leaving the seduction community– I wasn’t doing any of that attention-grabbing stuff. I was just being totally genuine and open and direct. In that way, I allowed her to be attracted to the real me, without hiding the real me behind lots of incongruent ego projection.

After leaving the seduction community, I kept some dancin’ habits o’ the monkey for awhile. It mostly came out when I was a little nervous in a social situation. I get nervous, I’d hide behind the old gimmicks without even thinking about it. I’m very thankful my girlfriend and I are open enough with each other that she was able to point this out to me. Nowadays I haven’t lapsed back into “monkey mode” in a long time. As a consequence, I get along with people a lot better. I’m finally starting to feel some genuine comfort with social interactions. Not the sheltered naive social retardedness I inherited from a strict Christian upbringing. Nor the creepy high-energy attention grabbers of seduction. Just genuine, natural, drinking-a-beer-together interaction, and I love it.

You might know some dancing monkeys in your own life. I urge you to be patient with them, hopefully it’s a phase, like it was for me. I’m very grateful to the friends who stood by my side through the whole process of transformation. Some friends I had in the “eunuch” stage stopped hanging out with me when I went seductor. It shows they were never really interested in the real me, just in the eunuch me who could always be counted on as the asexual guy-sitting-at-the-sidelines.

FURTHER READING

Read about my journey through the shady underground community of pickup artists in the article, My Time in the Seduction Community.

If you’re interested in club hopping and bar hopping, make sure to read my article about Hashigo Zake, the Japanese art of getting really drunk all over town. Leave it to the Japanese to make an art out of barhopping

In my article, The Throw: Reactivity vs. Responsiveness, I take a look at reactivity, behavior where you’re reacting to others, basically letting them control you. With reactive behavior, you’re attempting to look cool but you end up looking creepy.

She and I have come up with some neat variations for expressing affection. The first time she came up with one of these variations, she told me: “Say ‘you love me’”. I misunderstood and said, “I love you”. “No,” she said, “Say ‘you love me’” (more emphasis on the quotation marks). The concept of this variation was so simple and yet so new and powerful I was blown away.

Here are some variations for expressing and communicating love. These aren’t used as often, and thus, they still have their literal meaning, and haven’t yet become “love protocol”.

YOU LOVE ME

A great alternative, “you love me” expresses trust and confidence in the relationship. A great alternative to the clingy, needy nature of the usual words. Your partner can reciprocate with “you love me too” or any other variation.

I LOVE US

This is one of my favorites. When I tell my girlfriend “I love us”, I’m expressing that I’m happy with us as a couple, and that I’m happy with our relationship. You can love a video game or a plate of pasta, but you can’t really love your relationship with these things. This variation expresses something more unique, a kind of love you can’t have for TV shows or restaurants.

WE LOVE US

For an even more potent variation on the old three-word-combo, “We love us” combines the virtues of “You love me” with those of “I love us”. Not only is it an expression of affection for the entire relationship and couplehood of you and your partner, it also glows with confidence and trust.

THE OBLIGATION OF “I LOVE YOU”

Unfortunately, these words of love are often used as a kind of hostage phrase. Implicitly if we read between the lines, it goes like: “I love you,…”
“…so you have to go out with me!”
“…so you have to do things my way!”
“…so I should get away with treating you bad!”

“You love me” and “We love us”, by contrast, are more of a reminder of love. They don’t obligate, because your partner has the freedom to agree or disagree with them.

THE HABITUALNESS OF “I LOVE YOU”

Unfortunately, the standard expression of love has been so worn out in English that our response has become almost automatic. At the end of a conversation over the phone, your partner says “I love you” and you respond “I love you, too” without really even thinking about it. That’s affection? Whip out one of these variations to worm your way through all the distractions and really send an expression of affection with impact.

FURTHER READING

Who’s leading in your relationship, and who’s following? Read my article Leadership In Relationships and think of some ways you can assert yourself to spice up your relationship some more.

Me? I was clueless about relationships most my life. It wasn’t until I was 23 years old that I finally had enough and revolted against the momentum which was pushing me toward a life of loneliness. Read more: My Time in the Seduction Community.

For some more about how we use words and their meaning, check out, Using Words Effectively.