Our friend Michaela got back to us after the article from a couple of days ago about the man who consistently betrayed her.  (Before you boys tune out, this situation happens all the time to both men and women — ever heard of the expression ‘whipped’ before?  Then read on.)  She’s clarified the situation a bit.  Here’s the abridged version:

he fights very unfairly…he says ‘i forgot’ ‘i define sex differently’ ‘we never agreed to that’ or ‘i never said that’ (he says that about things he said in a clear strong voice less than a minute earlier) and, the hardest for me to understand, he blames me for creating the negative perspective of ‘being betrayed’ instead of ‘boy, isn’t that great for you!’ and avoids the part where he actually betrays me.

i feel i do create my experience, that i am responsible on some level for all that this world/my life is, and am stuck here trying to see how i can (more…)

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Yesterday, we talked about how to bypass friction, especially when it comes to meeting women.

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about how to overcome friction.

Basically, here’s the scenario: you’ve seen her. You’d like to meet her, but you’ve taken too long and your brain’s ‘aw crap’ mechanism has already kicked in. You’ve started thinking about it, which is the essence of friction.

Well, I would have preferred that you’d gotten in there quicker, but hey — this situation’s going to come up, so let’s deal with it, shall we?

What’s happened is that some kind of prior emotional state of friction has (more…)

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Thanks for your super-enthusiastic response to yesterday’s article on Friction: The Enemy.

Seems like we touched a nerve there, since so many of you signed up for the Approach Clinic before even knowing what time it was happening.

Good to know the natives are hungry.

Well then. I’m happy to serve, so let’s deliver some more.

In the last piece, posted on the blog yesterday, I talked about 3 ways of handling friction:

1) Bypass it.
2) Overcome it.
3) Remove it entirely.

The techniques I will share with you in the Approach Clinic will fall under these three categories.

To give you a preview of each method – you bypass friction by using your head cleverly.

You overcome friction by setting up physiological responses that give you a (more…)

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I had my first kiss when I was 19.

Her name was Emma. She was also 19, with an irresistible English accent and very cute to boot. I was pretty sure that I was going to marry her.

Except that she dumped me, pulverizing my heart into nanoparticles. It was the only time in my life that I got depressed: poor sleep, suppressed appetite, lotsa Kafka. It kinda sucked.

The next kiss didn’t come for another 4 years, when I was in medical school. That’s also when my career as a professional virgin came to an end. To understate things, I was a late bloomer in the realm of romance.

I wasn’t stupid or ugly. No hermit, either – knew most people on campus. No, I was just clueless.

Turns out that the skill set required to navigate the tricky waters of romantic interaction wasn’t in any book I had read or any class I had taken. Mom, dad, the sex-ed teacher – none of them had taught me any of this stuff.

This is a serious omission, since our relationships with others are the biggest (more…)

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