HOW-2 Meet Women

This is for all you shy and lonely guys out there. It's painful enough being alone, but seeing "everyone else" laughing and having a good time with wives and girlfriends, how easy it is to despair of ever gaining these pleasures, to resign yourself to being tortured forever by loneliness, to slip into hopelessness. To give up.

No! You hold in your own hands the power to change your life. If only you could turn the same talent and experience that have brought you success in other pursuits to the challenge of finding, meeting, and creating a relationship with a love mate, what wonders might you yet accomplish? For so many desperate and empty years you have struggled to find a companion, something that seems to come naturally to so many other men, yet you have choked on ashes and bitterness. Nonetheless, it is your very failures that make you worthy of love. You will succeed, you will relate in a rare and meaningful way to a woman, and to a depth that will forever be denied those to whom love comes too easily and who therefore take it for granted. You have remained true to the romantic ideal and have escaped the fate of those cynical "burnouts" that you envy in moments of weakness. Unlike the professional Romeos, those manipulators and skillful predators who attract women effortlessly, you see a love relationship as the singularly precious thing it is. How very fortunate will be the woman who wins your heart.

Hard work and pain lie ahead. This journey of self-discovery and transformation demands all the courage and determination you can muster. Grit your teeth, for there is much learning to be done, and many mountains loom in the distance. Fortunately you need only climb one at a time.

Each painful lesson will leave you, if bloodied, ever more determined to press onward. As hard steel is tempered by heating, then quenching in cold water, so will your character be strengthened by the hardships you surmount. Growing hurts.

If there is a purpose to life's cruelties and tragedies, it is to make of you a better person. It can be likened to stripping the faded and peeling paint from an antique piece of fine cabinetry to reveal the magnificence of the natural wood grain underneath. This lends credence to the assertion that the only truly strong and quality people are those that have been fire hardened and polished by adversity.

You will practice patience. You will be patient with yourself. You will be patient with the people you relate with. You will trust that all will work out for the best, and not force matters along. Relationships progress at their own pace, and it is ofttimes a slow one.

You will never, never give up.

Life is about making mistakes and collecting bruises, learning from them, becoming transformed by them. There is something universal about making a fool of yourself, falling on your face, being rejected by a woman. It has happened to you. It may well happen again. It happens to everyone.

Who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies? Erich Fromm

Admit your mistakes. There's no place to hide from them, but don't take them personally. They need not shatter your self-confidence. Be strong (the pain will recede). Stand back and analyze what happened. Take notes. Record your experiences, tell your story. Keep a journal. It will help you pull together the scattered fragments of your life and piece together the deeper meaning of it.

Before proceeding farther, it is time to define your own individual identity, to get a firm grasp on who and what you are, to figure out what differentiates you from all the other humans running around in the wide world. This is hard work, and will require a considerable investment in time and effort... and thought.


Exercise 1: Compose a 1000-word or longer essay, titled "Who I Am". Tell all about yourself, your interests and your goals, your passions, your hidden desires, your joys and your hurts, your strengths and your weaknesses, your sources of pride and what you are ashamed of. Essentially, you will be describing what you have to offer to the woman who will love you (for you can't come into a relationship empty-handed).

Exercise 2: Write a rather detailed autobiography. Recall as many as you can of the formative influences and people in your life. Remember your achievements and failures, your moments of triumph, and the depths of your pain and despair. Call it "How I Got Here".

Exercise 3: Write a short description of the woman you would like to meet, the one who haunts your dreams, the soul mate who will enter your life one day. Paint a "word picture" of her. What is she like? Is there anything particularly striking about her appearance? What is her personality? Why will she be attracted to you in particular?


These three essays will form the introduction, the frontispiece and anchor to your journal, the tale of your journey. Should you lose your way, this is your compass, your guide back to the path you will follow. Here is your first gift to yourself, a sense of direction.

Having a girlfriend will not solve any problems - it will tend to worsen them, if anything. Bonding with a woman will add to the tension and pressure already on you. You need to fix up your life and your Self to be worthy of a meaningful relationship, to be able to uphold your end of it. Learn to be comfortable with yourself, to use your aloneness creatively, to transform lonely into self-sufficient.

Gain social skills. Communicate with people. Learn how to talk. Becoming at ease in conversation makes it easier to make friends and relate to them. Empathize with and help those around you. Partake of their joys and griefs, their accomplishments and failures. Grow, and share your own experiences with them.

Build on your existing social connections - family, friends, and colleagues at work. Even business relationships of the most impersonal sort help establish your place in society and reinforce your inner sense of connectedness. You must break out of your isolation, emerge from your cocoon before you can even entertain the notion of a romantic relationship.

Recreate yourself as a more interesting person. Keep up with current events. Read books. Continue your education. Pursue hobbies and interests, cultivate skills. Become proficient in some endeavor, some field. Being looked up to as an expert will gain you respect and admiration. Help others and teach them.

Evolve and develop into a strong, independent individual. Become a helper, a resource. Give support and encouragement to those that need it. Be a pillar of strength to those weaker than you. Volunteer your services to groups that help others. Let the goodness in your heart shine as a beacon to those around you. Know that what you get from life is a return on what you give.

Every technique described from here forward is but a codification of what the socially adept do instinctively. So can you too master these modes of behavior by understanding and practicing them to the point where socializing becomes as natural as breathing.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones. John Cage

The following chapters are not, in any sense, intended to be a "paint-by-the-numbers" kit (rigid adherence to any recipe is generally doomed to failure). Rather, think of them as an all-purpose toolkit, a sort of Swiss army knife, a rough navigation guide. Let these writings serve as an inspiration on your voyage of development and self-discovery, in your apprenticeship to become a fully realized human being. Even if these teachings do not bring you a girlfriend, and they may not, at the very least, you will emerge from this with a better understanding of social interactions and of... yourself.

"Come to the edge," he said. They said, "We are afraid." "Come to the edge," he said. They came, he pushed them... and they flew. Guillaume Appolinaire