on pick-up artistry and a recount of the last few weeks

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*warning: huge post, i'm not responsible for the intense boredom that might ensue

Take it from me, the once super depressed aspie nerd (I can't say I'm no longer depressed, but I'm definitely on the route out of it, I think), pickup-artistry really does not deserve the bad rap it gets around here. For the last few weekends I've been "sarging" (I f*****g hate the PUA terminology and am more of a fan of inner game) with some guys and it's pretty much put my old way of thinking about women on it's head. Some of these guys are gigantic nerds (accountants, computer programmers, etc) and were once super introverted (many still are, but they've learned to pull out their extroversion when it's needed like in clubs or parties), but the type of girls who they're pulling out of the club would make almost anybody jealous.

I used to be completely self-conscious about my physical appearance and coming off as a huge nerd, but I can now feel years and years of accumulation of these negative, self-limiting thought patterns evaporating away and it's starting to affect how women look at me when I'm in a bar, club, or anywhere in public. A few weekends ago, I started dressing better when I went out to bars and boom all of the sudden random girls are approaching me, giving me high fives, grabbing my ass, and trying to take pictures with me (wtf?). At the time, I was sort of aspie shell shocked (randoms touching me, yikes that's kind of frightening) and didn't know how to react, so I just kind of tensed up my shoulders, brushed the girls off, and went back to drinking beer with my friends. If I were in the mental state I'm in now, I probably could've gotten at least a few numbers and maybe made out with one or two.

Fast forward to last weekend. I'm having a horrible time and going completely inside of my head during this Halloween party with a bunch of ivy league couples and a few cute girls here and there. The party decides to get out of the house and do some bar hopping. On the way there, my close friend also into PUA (similarly introverted and more inexperienced with women than I) is on fire with this one girl (his costume was fantastic and it was pulling attention left and right) and I'm getting jealous as hell, continuing my downward spiral of feeling more and more miserable.

Once we get to the bar, I have a martini and start feeling a little bit more comfortable in my own skin, and start chatting up the rest of the girls in the party. I start getting kind of chatty and eventually physically closer to this one girl who, in retrospect, I now realize had been eyeing me throughout the party (nothing big, just putting my arm around her shoulder and talking into her ear so that our faces touched a lot). At one point, I get bored of the situation there and decide to start walking around the bar. As I'm doing this, I keep going by this one girl (girl1) who is staring at me so god damn hard and giving me the come hither look that I'm almost positive I could've gotten a number, but I ignore her. Then, later on, I walk by this random girl (girl2), and while doing it, I give her what I guess was a suggestive look (I don't know, I have been clinically diagnosed with asperger's!), I hold it while walking up to her and don't say a god damn word. While I'm about to pass right by her, she smiles and grabs my shoulder says, "you know you like this song, let's f*****g dance." I refuse to dance with her out of my own discomfort with myself, but we still chat for a while, and the ENTIRE time she's giving me these come hither eyes until I tell her that I'm from way out of state, she gets sad looking and then says she's from out of state too and it could never work (lol, what could never work?). We part ways and I go back to wandering the bar.

I pass by girl1 again, hold the eye contact a bit again, she smiles, and I do nothing, LOL. I see this really cute chick in a weird costume dancing away alone and I go up to her and ask her what her costume is. We chat a bit, I find out she's a physics phd student at NYU and tell her she's too smart for me jokingly (well, not really, I'm gonna be a neuroscience graduate student soon). I'm holding the eye contact, she's laughing, and I'm getting really close again (I think my arm was around her shoulder? I don't remember). Then she says, "let's dance, roadgames!" and I once again refuse and tell her I've never done it. This one was persistent, though, and she backs me up against a wall and rubs her nether region vigorously on my leg, and I give into dancing. I start to get into it and have a really good time, and she's telling me I'm a natural at it (liar obviously). While dancing, we continue to chat more and find we have a ton in common (we're both huge nerds, etc). Eventually, I press myself right against her and am basically talking in her ear putting my lips on her ear while doing it. One time we go into talk like this, she basically attempts to kiss me and gets the side of my face, but I'm just doing my own thing, ignoring her signals/attempts, and simply wanting to enjoy the dancing and conversation. All the while, her friends are all grinning at me and looking really happy for her, and a bit jealous maybe. Eventually, I decide I'd had enough (perhaps I'm even subconsciously scared she might actually land the kiss on my lips next time??) and extract out of the situation, but before doing so I give her my phone to signal I want her number, and she gives it to me. While I walk away, she looks all sad. I guess cute girls don't know what to do when guys they like leave them hanging like that.

Luckily, I left just in the nick of time, because my good buddy had way too much to drink and was barfing. He looked like he was teetering on the brink of alcohol poisoning, so I stay outside with him, walk him over to a bench, and watch over him to make sure he doesn't pass out and actually enter real alcohol poisoning. He starts shaking hard and his eyes are doing weird things like rolling around. So I start getting concerned as hell and ask him if he's gonna need an ambulance, and he tells me he doesn't have insurance and denies that he needs one. Eventually, he looks barely conscious, is still shaking, eyes are rolling everywhere, and I call in an ambulance. I wait around for two hours while my buddy looks like he's dying and no sign of an ambulance. Luckily, three hours in, he starts coming back and the shaking stops, and I flag a taxi and get out of there.

Ridiculously enough, all the while I'm watching my nearly alcohol poisoned buddy outside, attractive girls are passing by me and attempting to chat me up. One sticks around and asks if I actually know the guy telling me that I'm so sweet, and I could've easily said "Nah, he's just some guy. You know what, I think he'll be alright, let's go get a drink", but the thought never crossed my mind. The aforementioned response was just the suggestion of somebody else while I was recounting this story to them.

Back on the train ride home, I'm realizing what the hell all that eye contact stuff actually means and how I either had never gotten come hither eyes from a girl ever before or just completely ignored them (most likely). I end up up a seating row from this cute girl on the train, and as soon as I maintain some eye contact with her, she smiles and looks harder into my eyes. Unfortunately, she was coming back to college with her mom seated right next to her and I decided to just do nothing about it. The entire train ride, though, we're exchanging these looks.

So that brings us to yesterday, where I hear about this cool talk by a famous author going down at my alma and invite this girl (girl3) to come along. Now this girl I met before I started going out partying with these PUA guys and she basically obliterated my self-confidence and destroyed my reality so much that I felt like she was the last straw I needed to push me over into suicide. I spent an entire summer thinking about how I f****d up with her, what went wrong, how much of an ugly loser I must be for getting rejected by a physically and mentally unattractive girl, and feeling like total dogshit. So you get an idea of how completely pathetic I was being, here's the sequence of threads I made about her: (first thread on her (she actually does end up going on some dates with me, but even at the beginning I'm in complete self-defeat mode), part 2 in the trilogy of patheticness, and part 3.

Back to girl3. So I call her and we have an interesting, fun conversation for like 20 minutes. She puts up some initial resistance to coming to the talk with me by saying she has a class from 5:30-9:30 (this could've been BS within itself, this girl ALWAYS has excuses), and I tell her to attend her class until 7:30 and then come to the talk. She's all like "OMG, roadgames, you make me do such bad things" and teasing me about being a jerk. She eventually basically agrees to it, but says she'll txt me to confirm at 6:50. Lo and behold, her professor is doing some *HUGEEEE* discussion thing that she absolutely must be at (sure whatever) and I tell her she's being lame and that she can at least come get coffee with me once the speech is over at 9:30. She later responds with a txt message saying "Ugh lol! You pick the worst times to do things, roadgames!! ! I have to carpool with this guy back home at 9:30. I'm sorry !" and I just respond with "K." If you think about it, this girl is obviously leading me on again and really doesn't like me at all as more than just an emotional tampon that is really entertaining. Honestly, she doesn't even like me as a friend from my perspective. OK, so you can't make it, give another time that DOES work like normal friends do. So I proceed to actually delete her number from everything I could possibly have it on (facebook messages and phone) and won't be able to contact her again in anyway. Before, this would cause massive depression and rumination, but now it's just like, who cares, you can meet girls literally anywhere.

At this point, my mind is regressing and forgetting the awesome weekend I just had, and going back into this self-degrading "what did you do wrong, you idiot???" mode, but as soon as I feel it slip, I start doing a bit of meditation, stopping my mind from heading through the trajectory that leads to complete self-consciousness and depression, and just go to the talk anyways because I love the commentator's ideas. While at the talk (effing amazing btw, great anti-racism activist who happens to be a white guy), this cute girl sits sort of besides me and at the end of the talk, I start chatting her up. We end up really hitting it off and have dinner together, and when I'm about to leave, I get her number and I start making out with her when she hugs me. The last thing on my mind before I went to sleep last night was girl3, haha.

Anyways, while the end of the first story was pretty ridiculous and a bit terrifying, I just realized how significant the last few weeks have been in the grand picture of my life. Even more so, the last year. I went from not being able to even hold an awkward conversation for 2 minutes with any girl and having girls think I was gay for avoiding them (I actually avoided being around girls almost completely up until last year because they just made me feel horrible inside and I could not relate to them in anyway besides wanting to fornicate with them) to being able to hold conversations with pseudorandom girls (girls in classes or work) and flirting with them to being able to be physically close and comfortable with completely random girls within 15 minutes of meeting them. While I have knocked on PUA before on here recently, ALL of my progress (as relatively little as it is) in the last few weeks is completely accountable to "sarging" with these guys. I used to think it was all about establishing common interests, intellectually connecting (I'm not saying that it isn't, but there is so much more to it than this), and qualifying yourself to them by impressing them with your intelligence, achievements, and analytical abilities. It isn't. A lot of them want to go for an emotional rollercoaster ride and the only way you can do this is by losing your self-consciousness and loving yourself for who you are so you can provide the stable foundation that allows them to do this. You need to be happy with yourself, and once you get to some threshold level, you'll be having so much fun on your own that they'll just gravitate to you. People want to be in the warm end of the pool, especially girls, and if you can be that warm end of the pool that makes everybody else (it doesn't have to be everybody, just the types of people you like) happy, the girls come as an emergent effect of this. You CAN do this as an aspie nerd, socializing is a learnable skill like anything else and PUA is one of the many ways to get there (I recommend the more inner game stuff, though, as the lines and whatever are finite, shallow acts and do not lead to true personal change).

I'm sure I'll be back on here to whine about my asperger's getting in the way, but more and more, it seems like a gift (intellectually and romantically) rather than something that hinders. Once you start getting comfortable with girls, you're going to drive them absolutely insane by naturally ignoring their signals and this will drive some to take the lead or just make it so blatantly obvious that you will not miss it.

I'm glad you found out what I've been saying elsewhere on this forum -- that men can be physically beautiful to those who are attracted to men.

And I'm glad you found out that instead of trying to overcome your Aspie traits, what can work quite well is to use them for all they're worth. That's what's always worked for me.

It's a gift, dude. The stuff it does make less than smooth CAN be tweaked (eye contact, posture, gait, etc) and you have the analytical tools to correct it.

Exactly.

Great news, great story (stories, really) and great realizations. This was a fun read. I laughed out loud at your transition about the barfing buddy. The way you did that was really funny!

Thanks for the updates about those old threads too. I often wondered about what would happen in the future after I read them.

Why does PUA get such a bad rap around here? Because, at the very least to aspie lines of thinking, PUA has it all backwards. I mean, come on, making out with a girl you don't even know?

This sounds strange to me. There is a fairly fundamental difference between the way I think, and the way the overwhelming majority - almost everyone I have ever met in my entire life - of people I have any contact with away from the internet think. It is obvious to anyone who knows me on anything more than the most superficial level. I am a strange person. I am usually cheerful enough (with occasional options on incoherent rage and crying fits ) and try my best to look for the positive side of things. I don't have a great problem with the people around me (in small numbers and familiar surroundings), but I absolutely do not connect with them and - without meaning anything bad by it - I do not want to. As ToadofSteel said, it's backwards. I will find someone I relate to, and work from there!

Way to go!

I too had this kind of transition/epiphany but mine took way longer to achieve. Back in the day I was the woebegone type who was scared of his own shadow and thought I "deserved" to fail, then gradually over time and some therapy (mainly co-dependency and alcoholism) I came out the other end, functioning yet slightly bitter/depressed; then reached a stage where the universe "owed" me a woman. Then I got bored and stopped caring about it. Then that gradually went away and right now I have a great girlfriend who is a musician like myself. I "cold-hit" on her, which in and of itself was a major milestone, as in the past I had either been set-up by family, thru work, thru blind dates (yuck!), on the internet (even worse!! !) or college classes, and it took a lot of nerve to "man up".

But ironically I have noticed that the more confident I have gotten the more the ladies tend look at me, interact with me and *horror of horrors* give signs that they want me! (I am sure now I am really thinking there's no reason they shouldn't be looking so maybe I notice it more not just because I'm positive and they respond because of that, but also because I am positive and think it's POSSIBLE they'll respond, so I look for responses).

My latest experiences were these two separate ones just yesterday and today:

#1: shopping at the mall - I dressed better than I usually would, and in several department stores caught women looking at me (not cuz I was on fire or anything!! !) - partially due to dressing better but mostly because I was exuding an air of confidence and calm, and my posture was better (no slouching) - also I think women like men who like to shop (I was with my gf at the time). I even had this beautiful Asian lady look at me and make eye contact while I was sitting at a table outside one of the stores (she was with an older relative when I smiled at her), and believe it or not three minutes later came by to look at me again, we smiled at each other and she REALLY looked me in the eyes for about 10 seconds as if to say "I know you're attached but damn! you're cute - where's MY guy?" but in a playful way (my gf had her back to the lady and no way I'd have interacted if my gf could have seen this.) I also talked with a cashier for 5 minutes and although it was not an intentional flirting occasion I realized that I was drawing her out of her shell (she had been in another industry and had gotten got laid off, which I found out by asking her how the sales were this year compared with last year - drawing her into the convo, but making it about her not about me).

#2: Then today (I teach piano) this lady who is a Master's Degree Student at a nearby university came to her lesson dressed in a mini-skirt (mind you it was about 60 degrees at the time), displaying her legs intentionally, was acting a little nervous (not because of mistakes I can assure you as she is very talented but I suspect a teacher-student pedestalizing in the early stages!) and I said she needed to calm down and not take any criticism personally (she blushed). Then when the lesson was nearing its end when I asked her to write a note into her assignment book about a particular bad habit she should watch out for when practicing, she faced away from me and wrote the details down in her notebook WHILE SHE THRUST HER BUTT OUT AT ME TO LOOK AT FOR 10-15 seconds!! ! Mind you, I am a faithful guy, but the attention is really an ego-boost. (All you women who think I was a cad and stared, well I did for about 2 of those seconds and the chivalrous dude took over and I averted my eyes).

In my experience it's really about how you believe in and love yourself, your calmness, you ability to BE THERE FOR THEM but without being whiny, needy or playing the stupid *let's pretend to be friends* game; it's about listening, smiling, wanting to make the interaction good for them first, and not putting too much importance/investing too much emotional energy on YOUR success. And mind you, even though I am not looking whatsoever, it sure is great knowing that I could go out there and find another worthy if forced to. And also about how many fish in the sea there really are, so there is absolutely NO need to chase anyone!! !! That's the kiss of death in a man's dating life.

And as you stated - - with practice even Aspies can learn social cues/body language/signals. If I can do it I dare say nearly anyone could.

P.S.: the shy ones at the mall who thought I wouldn't catch them staring then who lowered their eyes out of self-consciousness when I did catch them (pretending they weren't even looking!! !) are really the cream of the crop. I lurves me some shy women!! !

Jeez, I love to see that I'm not the only aspie who's learning to be extroverted and getting really comfortable with it.

I went out last night with the PUA guys and literally had the best night of my life again. I had such high energy that some of the guys there that hadn't seen me for a while were commenting on how I changed and looked more confident now. Random people in the bars were giving me high fives and what not. It was so fun, lol.

My favorite set of girls I opened up to dancing was this pair that was leaving as my buddy was talking to them, and you could tell they wanted to dance, but he was just not acting ballsy enough to do it. I decide to interject and say "hey, you guys are missing out so much, my buddy and I are professional dancers (not)" and they're still like "no no no" with wide smiles. So what I do is grab one by the wrist and just lead her back to the club and she's giggling like crazy the entire and we instantly hit it off. The entire time we're out on the floor, she's grinding the crap out of me and we're having a great time. I eventually tell her I need to get going and get her number.

If you told me that I'd be doing what I'm doing right now a year ago, I wouldn't believe it. Not a flipping word of it.

So basically, the way I see pick up artistry right now is that it's almost a behavioral treatment/intervention if you have literally no ability and need to explicitly learn to detect the signals women project. Once you have some success, you won't need to partake in these groups and you'll hopefully be able to pursue the girls that strike your fancy in your everyday life (work, school, extracurriculars, whatever).

Realizing that you actually get "eye-fucked" by girls has basically been a gigantic epiphany for me. I really used to think I was the most unattractive guy on the planet, and then boom, once you start watching the eyes and facial expression of random strangers when you look at them, you start to notice things you never would otherwise. It basically tells you who's likely to blow you off and who's less likely to blow you off. This is a boon to me, honestly. Being aware of eye contact really eases the nerves when I'm approaching some girl and it sort of tells me which girls to approach to begin with.

The currency of attraction is probably body language.

Well, if it works for you, then good for you. I don't see it working for me that well. I got a girlfriend just fine without it. And seeing as how strangers (of either gender, not singling anybody out here) are basically completely unpredictable variables in life, getting to know them and how they act is pretty much the only way I can manage it. Not to mention that I'm 100 pounds overweight and my body would never be attractive to any woman, so becoming friends first and using my personality is pretty much the only usable option I have... at least until I have my own apartment and have the room for some kind of workout machine...

I emphasize the word "I" because obviously, your approach works for you, while mine works for me. Nobody (especially here on WP) has the right to criticize you as a person for using a technique that works for you (and if they do, you have every right to contact a moderator to warn the offending person). However, anyone has a right to disagree with you (as I am now), as long as it stays about the issues. So if we can agree to disagree, that would be for the best...

Whoa! Toad, you landed a GF? Way to go, man! Congrats; you've been wanting that for a long time! Good news.