WHAT IS A MAN? (5 min read)

Men get confused about this issue. Some even get pissed off.

“What right do you have to tell me what a man is, they’ll say.

I get it.

I struggled with this for decades myself when I studied behavioural sciences in college and university decades ago…

Lucky for me, my old man once told me I wasn’t supposed to understand women, which made me study the literature even more over the last 35 years to arrive at the conclusions I present to you here.

Tell you what. Don’t let institutions of supposed higher learning do your defining because for the most part, they will fail you.

As I often say, you might lose your virginity attending college, you might not. But you will definitely lose your sense of humour.

Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke. 😉

I’m going to try to give you a working definition of what it means to be a man and I’m going to use the shield you see in front of you to do it.

Here’s some mythology to preface my remarks:

– Ancient Chinese tell of a chaotic world into which Pan Gu the Giant was born, who then pushes the heavens and earth apart to create order.

– Yin and Yang were born of chaos and reside at the center of the earth. They represent the intertwined nature of order and chaos.

– Yang is masculine action while Yin the feminine force of observation, the two expansive and contractive forces of nature.

– In the Yin and Yang symbol, order is white with a black dot, while Chaos is black with a white dot, each seeded with the other’s possibility. Order can become chaotic, and chaos can be ordered.

– The Greeks had a similar view of chaos as the natural state of the world in which the Gods were created to bring order. Chaos is first mentioned by the Greek Hesiod in “Theogony” some three thousand years ago.

The above gives us two Life Forces, Feminine Chaos and Masculine Order, both of which exist in us all. Though women will hold more chaos and men more order, at least, that’s the theory or the ideal.

I suggest that what is happening in our times is that in a great worldwide vacuum of male weakness, order is being supplanted by chaos.

Read the essay Men at Work to find out what brought us here:

Let’s contrast men and women’s lived experience.

She is the burdened female because she holds more negative emotion (which lets her see sickness in children and danger in the environment), menstruates, grows life inside her, and risks her own death in childbirth.

Think that counts as a burden? No male can ever know this.

She is precious because she has scant twenty good years of fertility while men can usually father children into old age. Men also use beauty to motivate themselves and her beauty is fleeting.

He has his own cross to bear as the expendable male. Nature usually makes more boys, 51 to 49%. More boys are born than females because more boys die in childbirth or are born with problems.

Most prisoners are male. More men commit suicide. Men die earlier.

All the riskiest jobs are predominantly male. Roofers, loggers, plumbers, mechanics, carpenters, miners, firefighters, iron workers, truck drivers, cement masons, power lineman, crane operators, highway workers and garbage collectors are more than 80% male.

But it is as a powerful defender that the expendable male earns his keep.

Work place deaths? 95% male. War casualties? 85% male. More than 80% of cops are male. It is men who defend families, and who teach brothers to defend sisters from predatory males.

Of course, there is some overlap between men and women. Missus doesn’t trust me to get the garbage out on time so has put the garbage out for the last 17 years. Bless her heart. Both sexes are relatively adaptable.

Men and women have always banded together to take advantage of each other’s strengths and to shore up each other’s weaknesses. Together, they are Team Human.

With all that said, what defines a man is his ability to defend. 

He is a powerful defender, or he is NOT a man.

I can hear the guffaws from here.

Let me give you an irrefutable argument as to why this is:

If you refuse to defend, someone else, one of the other MEN, has to step into the breech and defend for you.

Someone else has to risk their life to do your defending.

That’s OK if you are sick, injured, or a child.

And I’m not talking about conscientious objectors to something like the war in Vietnam. I’m talking about being under attack, culturally or otherwise.

It’s NOT OK if you are a grown male who refuses to be a man.

It is not manly to weakly abdicate your defender responsibility.

And leave it to some other brother to take up your slack.

To be a man you must defend life. Period.

This is how nature sets things up.

She creates life.

You defend life.

Together, we survive the suffering of our existence together.

One last thing. About 10% of people are dark triad types, meaning psychopathology, narcissism, Machiavellianism, or just plain cruel.

These personality disordered mother fuckers are most dangerous as males and often easily hide their disorder among us.

When men are weak and stop defending, who do you think rises to the fore and starts running things?

Exactly. Look around you.

Let that be your challenge my brothers.

I am calling upon you to stand shoulder to shoulder with me and other MEN in defense of meaning and freedom.

Join a men’s group near you or join me online in the 10MM men’s groups. 

Just make sure you bring the defender ethos to your tribe. 

Start by defending your body, the universal address of your existence.

Defend your spirit, which speaks for your soul.

Defend belonging, your family, friends, community and culture.

Defend your work, your business, your money.

And follow your masculine destiny as a man.

The world desperately needs powerful men.

Questions? Comments?

true and free
cw

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Death is an inevitable part of life.

If you have lost someone dear recently, you have my deepest sympathies.

The truth is, all of us have lost or will lose loved ones. The deeper the bond the greater the ordeal.

As a man, you need to be ready for death.

Dealing with it will fall to you. It’s not your fault if this doesn’t come naturally, as a society we tend to make death and dying off-limits.

Amongst men, we need to talk about it.

In the second appendix of SIPPING FEAR PISSING CONFIDENCE, I tell of how I learned the phrase, “The Pain Stops Here.” Access the book to get the full story.

Essentially, a friend of mine with three sons lost the youngest in a tragic accident. His family was devastated: wife under unimaginable pain, his remaining two boys lost and confused.

Despite his own grief, in short order he gathered his remaining family and had them share their memories and suffering, promising they’d be heard.

Then he told them, “The pain stops here.”

They kept their memories intact and moved ahead in honour of their lost family member. It would have been an insult to his life to do otherwise.

My friend saved his family from a lifetime of self-recriminating regret in that one instance of masculine leadership.

It was hugely difficult, everyone cried, but they did it.

His sons grew up and started families of their own. I see pictures on FB every year as he takes his wife on their annual ski holiday. Bless them.

Leadership at times like these is a task that falls to men, to you and me.

Aim to be the most reliable person at a funeral, JP said…

Ma went after a two-day vigil at her home, surrounded by nine adult children and her husband of sixty-two years.

I had the privilege of leading my siblings in prayer for much of those two days. My father gratefully said I was the “emergent leader” of the family.

Bless his heart. He died five years later of dementia.

A man who uses his power and love in service of himself and others finds meaning and freedom.

Seems to me we can prepare now for the inevitable.

And heal us a little too.

If I may, the following is what has helped me over the years…

That you exist over there while those whom you care for exist elsewhere is an inadequate way to describe what it is to be humans.

Fact is… we exist in each other.

I have things that I say nowadays I know came directly from my mother.

Kids scrape a knee and bleed a little and I always think (and sometimes say) “that’s the badness coming out.”

“No rest for the wicked” is another one of hers… It just pops out of me.

Or the old man.

I was putting my two kids in the car seven or eight years ago and once in their car seats I said, “Watch your fingers, watch your toes, canteen open, canteen close…” out of the blue.

It was just like when Dad was putting us nine kids in the ’67 Pontiac Parisienne, one up, one back, baby on a knee, no seatbelts.

The old man retired a Lt. Commander, and that little ditty was what they said on the navy ships to close the canteen. He used it to get us kids to keep our fingers away from the jambs whilst he was slamming the doors shut.

When I said that to my children, it was the first time I heard it in over 40 years. But it came out automatically. From somewhere deep within me.

In that very instance, I was my father who exists in me.

He was not and is not gone at all.

There’s a ton of things that I have picked up from those around me over the years. Even if those people live in another city and I will never likely see them again, do I grieve them?

Or do I just remember “Oh yes, I learned that from so and so….”

It is similar when you lose someone you were close to. You may be unsure of where you exist in them once they pass on, but they are still in you.

The people you care about and spend time with echo endlessly down through time in you and others left behind.

Assuredly too, they appear… here and there.

Like my father and mother often do, as well as countless friends, some still around and some who are gone, they speak… through me.

Because they are not gone at all. We exist in each other…

We might keep grief around out of loyalty to our lost one. This is misplaced pain. Not a chance our beloved would want a lifetime of regret for us.

Better to honour them by living the best life we can.

Last night I was speaking with my Missus about these things.

OK, it wasn’t supper table talk but later in the evening. I remarked on how this was the best of times for us, that the children and her and me were connecting magically each day. She agreed.

I’m a quite a bit older than she is, so I told her that even when I’m gone, she will always have these moments to look back on. She said it would make her miss me. I told her I’d always be with her.

That even now, when I’m out and about, shopping or running errands, her words and image come to my mind and heart. Around the house it’s the same. She is always in me.

We have learned plenty from each other. I told her I would not want her to suffer my loss and reassured her that I will always be with her. She will also know she got the very best of me. That was my gift to her.

Over the years I’ve had the privilege of explaining this viewpoint to many men to help in being able to lead his family in their time of need.

For this, falls to men.

If not you, then who?

I send you blessings of power and love.

true and free…
cw

___________

I do free calls with men (and sometimes women) to see if I can help and sometimes I agree to work with them.

OEDIPAL MALE

You can look up the original story of Oedipus Rex, a play by Sophocles some 2400 years ago.

The short form is Oedipus is an abandoned child who grows up suspecting he’s adopted. One thing leads to another and he ends up killing his real father in a quarrel over who has the right of way out on the road. Then he goes to the city of Thebes, solves the riddle posed by the Sphinx devouring humans at its entrance to get in, and is awarded the kingdom and its Queen.

Sure enough, the Queen is his mother, recently widowed after her King is killed while out on the road by you know who… When the gig is up, she hangs herself for banging her own son and he gouges out his eyes in disgrace for breaking the incest taboo. Fucking Greeks eh?

Freud seized upon this tragedy to speak of the Oedipal male: the boy in love with his mother and who secretly hates his father while seeing him as a rival for her love.

This my friends, lies at the core of male weakness all over the world. Man boys get stuck here.

My son was five when he overheard me call missus my woman at the supper table. “Dad,” he said, “Mommy is MY woman” he insisted. What ensued was the sweetest exchange between father and son, a push and pull that has gone on for two years (and is still ongoing).

Last year, I overheard him telling his mother he was going to marry her when he grew up. She told him she couldn’t but that he would always be her “Little Bear.” That’s her pet name for him.

Over the past two years he’s grown more accustomed to me. I’ve taught him a few things and let him hit the heavy bag in the garage. He accompanied me on walks after dark in the forest, testing the limits of his fear. He pushes the 5 lbs. dumbbells in my office. He tells me of how he will defeat all sorts of imaginary enemies. Now he sits with me on the couch sometimes. Recently, just to see, I asked him about whose woman mommy was, he told me, “How about we share her…” He is making progress.

And of course we do share her. Just as surely as he will slowly withdraw from the influence of his mother over the coming years and come more and more under mine. He will need this as the demands of life on a little boy add up and compound through adolescence to where he requires the powerful masculine to help him negotiate obstacles that are sure to be in his path.

This is the “cure” for the oedipal male: to move away from the feminine and towards the masculine. It is every male’s rite of passage, a necessity of male maturation. For now my son must bask in the glory of feeling fully loved by his mom. He must see her as his primary “angel of mercy” as she nurses him through his first ten years. He is delicate of heart, and my son’s medical conditions mean his mother is vigilant and near. He is secure in her love and attention and his confidence shows it. He’s fearless with people, will talk to anyone. And day by day he gains more masculine power from the safety of her support.

But eventually, her love and attention will suffocate him. His lifeforce will be that much stronger for having had her in his corner, as a foundation of security and tenderness he may call upon forever more. However, he will need to shed her chaos and move towards masculine order to find meaning and freedom.

At some point, the boy must leave the mother to become a man.

Absent this natural transition, and without this period of reveling in the embrace and security of her feminine love, the danger is that he will seek her out in others for many years.

Some men do this for life, and never get the message, never feeling satiated, carrying a mother wanting with them into every decade and into every failed or unsatisfying relationship. Every addict and pick up artist suffers from this effect. Many other men are needy and weak or tyrants and aloof. It’s the mother wound: a maelstrom of confusion and anxiety and expectations and fear…

And just as it is natural for my little boy to slowly move into the masculine, such is the cure for the adult Oedipal male. He must find men and learn to absorb the masculine while abandoning his over-reliance on the feminine. He must confront his weakness and find his power. He must reclaim his masculinity while getting out from under the spellbinding power of the feminine. Later he finds his own feminine aspect rather than look for his mother in others. The anima. He welcomes back his feminine side only after first finding his masculine.

He must reverse the flow. He grows to no longer expect love at all, but rather realizes he has an abundant reserve of masculine power and love within him to share with others. He must get out of his head and instead, open his heart. Not to receive, but to give.

He uses his power and love in service of himself and others to find meaning and freedom.

For he realizes that the only person in the world upon whom he may reliably count on with any confidence for unconditional love is himself.

Anything less and he remains a boy…

Stay powerful, never give up, This is the day…

©2021 CHRISTOPHER K WALLACE

REACH ME

Trained behavioural science counsellor for 35 years.

I do free calls for members and sometimes agree to work with a man: |https://go.oncehub.com/ChristopherWallace

10 REASONS NOT TO SHARE THE BOOK… with your SO

Big mistake to share the book with your missus. Better to make the changes on your own and earn and/or take respect and win hearts and mind to earn her loyalty. Off the top of my head, here are ten reasons you should not share the book with your gal.

1. Sharing the book with her gives you an excuse to say, “See, it’s not my fault.” This is true. But it’s also an attempt to seek maternal acceptance, which is your problem in the first place.

2. Sharing the book with her burdens her. She carries more negative emotion in general, something she uses to spot sickness and danger in her environment. Some of the stuff in the book applies to you and some or much of it does not. If she reads the book, you are on the hook for all of it.

3. Sharing the book with her means she becomes your examiner, and you must meet her expectations to grow all while she keeps score. I won’t elaborate on that, figure it out.

4. Sharing the book with her may trigger, “abuse of empathy is a woman’s birthright” when she’s feeling uncertain and out of sorts. You will have handed her an irrefutable position that is right… about everything.

5. Sharing the book with her means all of your faults are on the table, none of hers. Forget about broaching this in the future. You will have lost your moral authority.

6. Sharing the book with her was an idea Glover promoted when he was conducting couples counselling and was there to referee. Tell me about how Glover has moved into your house.

7. Sharing the book with her means she gets to evaluate every aspect of the Breaking Free exercises and Rules to live by through a “what does this mean for me?” lens. That cannot help but leave her feeling as if you are pulling away from her.

8. Sharing the book with her lets her know that you are preoccupied with your weakness. This tends to form even greater contempt. Contempt is the greatest predictor of break ups.

9. Sharing the book with her means that she walks outside every day and stares at the blue sky above and says to herself, “I have failed,” for her one job in life was to find a powerful man who would stand by and build a tribe with her. Instead, she chose a child.

10. Sharing the book with her is like talking to her in a foreign language. Why? Because women don’t get male weakness. Even female therapists don’t, and why I think they should be avoided. You don’t bleed out of your vagina every month; your body doesn’t balloon up grotesquely in pregnancy; you don’t risk your life delivering life; you are not saddled with worry and anxiety keeping a child alive as she is; and you don’t watch your youthful beauty come and go in the span of a few years like she does. You will never know any of this. And now you want to talk to her about what a pussy you are. Even if she knows you are a pussy, she will have as much empathy for your troubles as you do for her feminine woes.

It’s too easy to convince yourself that you are doing the right thing by sharing your weakness with your wife, but you should not trust your covert-contract, give-to-get, passive-aggressive judgment.

Instead, join a men’s group like 10MM and work out your shit amongst men.

Said with love and compassion, I’ve got your back…

true and free…
cw

* Join the 10MM boards here:

https://advisortomen.com/10mm-board/

FEELINGS explained (5 min read + 1 min summary)

Brother, there is so much talk out there about men getting in touch with their feelings, it’s enough to make your head spin.

This is probably a good thing because men are good at suppressing emotion to get through immediate challenges, but it’s repression that bites us in the ass. Denying how we feel hurts us longer term.

Let me see if I can give you some simple truths.

Your emotions happen first when the body’s “Spidey Sense” figures out where it is in the environment. ex. raining, cold, hot, dark, light, at a beach, or walking through South Chicago at 2 am. etc.

It contrasts this with the body’s internal condition such as: hungry, need to take a piss, a #2, coming down with a flu or sniffles, allergies, a good or bad night’s sleep, or a sore back, knees, neck, or headache, etc.

These combine to create something called affect, which comes in two kinds: comfort vs discomfort or aroused vs relaxed.

Follow so far?

This affective state is sent up the nervous system pipeline to the brain in a process called interoception.

Mammals have seven affective drives: seeking, care, lust, and play, plus rage, fear and grief.

Emotions are what happens in the body while feelings are the labels you give to those affective sensations.

The brain takes the primary signaling from the body and runs it by secondary concepts formed from your databank of experiences (all the way back to birth) and creates a prediction.

Then, you either confirm or deny the prediction according to the social reality before you.

For example, recently, I saw a white Samoyed dog in my chicken pen while looking out my kitchen window. Snapping my head back to look again, I saw it was two white chickens, the one in the rear our big matriarchal hen fluffing up her feathers with her tail arching over her back.

Missus looked out at the bird feeder few days later and said, “Oh look, a duck.” Looking again she saw it was actually a red squirrel with its tail pointed out resembling a duck beak.

You overhear a conversation you interpret as negative and feel aroused, only to listen more carefully and realize they are actually saying something else. Now you relax and feel another way entirely.

We all do these sorts of things every day in all kinds of circumstances.

What this tells you is that what your brain interprets… is milliseconds behind messaging from the body.

What goes on in your head is a best-guess by the brain awaiting correction.

It’s also why we can be fooled by affective reality derived from those seven emotional drives. We can be blinded by seeking, care, play, rage, fear, grief… and lust.

Tell me about it. Ever happen to you?

Since you were a kid, those primary drive affects secondarily became states like empathy, trust, pride and blame, guilt and shame.

You later named those feelings in the “tertiary” part of your brain at the neocortex and formed beliefs about yourself and your reality.

That’s Feelings 1-2-3 you could say.

It’s why I teach that what people say is not so much a contract with the people around them and more like a trial balloon floated for feedback.

It’s why learning to paraphrase helps us understand each other.

The key is to realize the brain is predictive, not reactive

Your take on your emotions is derived from your experience.

You are run by your nervous system and your conscious awareness is along for the ride.

If you feel something today, you have likely felt it before.

There is nothing new to the brain. Everything is compared historically.

You see the ocean for the first time and the brain compares it to the big lake you went to as a kid.

Encounter a mountain range, the brain sees them as bigger hills.

Your feelings are unique to you because no one has ever lived your exact experience and no one ever will. That has social consequences.

Think of when you can’t seem to connect with someone you just met. It’s probably not that you are psychopathic (though you could be). More likely, you just don’t share enough similar concepts to identity with each other.

What does all this mean for you going forward?

To me, it means we take 100% responsibility. 100% ownership.

The advantage? The buck stops here.

Your freedom is in fully owning your thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

Think about it: it’s all we ever truly own in life anyway.

You may realize the good news:
1. You can change your feelings by living new experiences
(doing things differently).
2. To change how you feel, change how you think and what you do.

Use your body to create different affective states.

Use your mind to change the interpretations of those states, experiences and even, memories, at the tertiary (interpretative) level of emotion.

Breathwork, mindful practices, self hypnosis, optimism and getting better at connecting with others are some of the best ways to do this.

Join a men’s group: make it a mandatory part of your life. Our need to belong is our greatest need. We are herd animals

My suggestion is you re-read this a few times and refer to it in the future.

If you can solve your emotions and feelings, you are in charge.

Here’s a summary:

Understanding Your Feelings: A Simplified Guide for Men

As men, we’re often taught to suppress our emotions, but this can come back to hurt us in the long run. Here are some simple truths to help you better understand your feelings:

• Your emotions are the result of your body’s “Spidey Sense” figuring out where you are in your environment and your internal bodily conditions. Together, they create an affective state of either comfort or discomfort, and arousal or relaxation.
• Your brain then takes this primary signaling from the body and runs it through secondary concepts formed from your databank of experiences, creating a prediction that can be confirmed or denied based on the social reality before you.
• Emotions happen in the body, while feelings are the labels you give to those affective sensations. Your brain is predictive, not reactive, and your feelings are unique to you based on your individual experiences.
• To better understand your feelings and take 100% ownership of your thoughts, feelings, and behavior, consider joining a men’s group, practicing breathwork and mindfulness, and better connecting with others.
• You can change your feelings by living new experiences, changing how you think, and what you do. Use your body to create different affective states, and your mind to change the interpretations of those states, experiences, and memories.

By understanding your feelings and taking responsibility for them, you can experience true and lasting freedom.

true and free…
cw

Join a men’s group here:

https://services.advisortomen.com/courses/10MM

Ice storm knocked my power is out… and life goes on. A little propane… and coffee. A generator and extensions and guidance from my 9-year-old… and weak internet.

So here is part 2 of our series on using dating apps. It’s a full essay of information so takes 10 minutes to read. No matter your current situation, it’s worthwhile because the trend is growing, not decreasing. You likely will either use them or know someone who uses them in the future.

Last week, I went over some of the pitfalls of dating apps, including how multiples of choice at times tyrannizes both the men and women who use the platforms.

Because women do the choosing, the disadvantages here fall to us men. The sheer volume of options she holds in the palm of her hand (literally) are overwhelming.

Women follow a three phase life trajectory: maiden, mother, matriarch. Her time in each, as first a maiden and then a mother, is further limited by her fertility and any aging children she has produced, and in rarer cases, how she looks after sometimes ailing or elderly parents.

The grandmother hypothesis says women’s fertility stops in her forties to make her available to help a daughter raise their own children.

In the fifty years or more since this was proposed, nothing has disproved it yet. We still see this clearly in smaller tribal groups and often in closer-knit societies and families.

I’d argue it is this overall limited fertility period which gives a woman her preciousness.

For perspective, just think of how a man can continue fathering children into old age. Remember that dude in 2007 who fathered a healthy baby girl with his fourth wife at 90 years old?

He told The India-Times he intended to stop having children when he hits the big 100 years of age. Champ.

Her preciousness also burdens her, as she benefits from a greater acuity at spotting sickness in children and danger in the environment (by way of a negativity bias).

This “gift” is at the same time helpful but also often a mystery few women understand.

You get the odd old gal who, looking back on her life, will admit, “I was a nut” or “I drove myself crazy” or such things.

I think most gals don’t see it though (or do but fail to admit it).

I tend to believe one reason is because the majority don’t have a powerful man by her side to help “check” her negativity bias, sometimes acting indirectly in how he leads the relationship to steer her, and others, clear of her discomfort and sometimes, her storms.

Instead, you now have a feminized culture projecting this negativity bias onto its male members. In our collective weakness, we have made ourselves easy targets. Masculinity itself is under attack.

Just this morning, I read journalist describe Trump’s response to being charged with 34 counts of “whatever” as being met with his usual “hyper-masculinity.” Talk about painting all men with the same brush.

This is the culture in which women have to find connection, maybe love, maybe a partner.

If she is in the maiden maturational phase, time is of the essence (as the real estate contract clause goes), and her risk to self concept and social standing has never been so great.

She often gets only marginal help, as many women are now operating outside the deeper community of support women evolved to rely upon.

In the quiet of the internet, her shadow can prevail.

My son Corrie straddled the digital and in-person dating modes and found a wife. Or… more accurately, she found him. Now aged 39, I got him to read The Flaky Date part one.

I remember him telling me back then that his dating life changed as soon as he grew a “sea captain” beard.

He’s a good looking kid but in a world of confused men, such first impressions count. It is not lost on me that this symbolized manliness to many women and turned their heads his way.

Beards have become fashionable again. We all should have bought equity in a beard oil company a while back.

My number one son offers you some of his thoughts on using dating apps, included here only slightly edited. He says:

“#1. Dating (and dating online) is no different than sales.

It is a numbers game and requires persistence and the ability to not take “no” personally.

Some women aren’t even there to actually meet men, but rather use it as a quick form of validation via matches and guys fawning over them, only to disappear when she’s done playing with you.

Let it go and don’t get attached.  Until you’ve met them, to me, they aren’t real.  They may as well have been a bot.

Think of it as nothing but a fake profile from the app itself trying to keep male user retention high (this has an added benefit of protecting the ego).

#2. Not all apps are created equally.

Tinder for example is primarily visual. It’s the easiest for women to use, men too, and you in turn, get a higher rate of flakes.  It may attract gals who aren’t serious about meeting or are only serious about a specific type of male (her preference or higher value male).

Don’t invest time in analysing women’s photos and making a pros and cons list before giving them the go ahead, say yes to everyone and see who you match with, then filter based on what your wide net brought you.

Use catch and release.

#3. When it comes to pictures, profiles, and messages, just like sales, less is often more. For starters, pictures should tell a specific story that will validate you in some way to your prospective match.

a.  Dressy photo (wedding, professional event, etc.) to show that when necessary, you clean up well.

b. Social photo, preferably with 1 or 2 attractive women. But not where you’re draped all over them or with an ex.

This is to show that you aren’t an incel/recluse and that other attractive women are happy to be in your presence (or at the very least can tolerate you).

If you have a social photo where you’re laughing, that tells them you’re fun to be around, great!

c. Another photo should be some kind of action photo.

Do you ski, hike, fish, play sports, etc.?

Show them you are an independent person and lead a happy and fulfilling life regardless of your relationship status (I had a skydiving photo for instance).

d. Got a dog?

Great! I’m convinced that Mr. Newman (my dog) has gotten me laid more times than I’d ever had been able to without him.

If the guy has a cat, consider getting rid of that cat because that’s just gay, let’s be real😉 (cw: don’t hate!)

However, pics of you and your dog are easy for women to like and an easy conversation starter once you’re in contact with them.

Your profile pictures tell a story, so it’s important that a guy chooses them wisely.

Topless muscle photos are “douchey.” An exception is when it’s an action shot playing volleyball with friends and pretty women, which is less vain and therefore, less “douchey” (douchie?).

Also, topless muscle pics scream to women “I just want to fuck,” and you’ll turn some off unnecessarily.

Same goes for sloppy-slob photos where you’re unkempt. Women don’t want to be your mom (ouch! cw).

Keep total photos to no more than 6 but no less than 3.

#4. First messages.

Sure, you can spend 20 minutes reading a woman’s profile and crafting a custom opener for her, but remember, this is a numbers game.  You’re better off having a simple and solid opener and only personalising if something jumps out at you.

Just like doing doors (note: Corrie ran door sales crews for years like his old man), if something about the property or the person sticks out, mention it, otherwise, come up with some simple icebreakers.

“Hi” is lame.  Do better.

A little bit of research and some forethought and you can come up with some funny/witty/interesting openers to copy and paste to matches or women you’re into.

#5.  Once you’ve messaged and they’ve responded, the goal is to move the conversation off the platform ASAP, and to something more personal like a phone number, IG, telegram, WhatsApp, etc.

I would try to go about no more than 10-15 exchanges before steering them to a text. This helps identify attention seekers with no intention of meeting you and allows you to focus on only those interested in meeting someone.

I’m not wasting my time talking to some broad I’ve never met for hours/days on end before I ever meet them.  They could be using 10-year-old photos for all I know.

The goal is always moving to the next step and stage of development.

Don’t invest too much time and effort with nothing to show for it.

#6. Online dating is a lot of fun… once you get good at it and remove any emotional attachment.

Women have their own tips and secrets to weed out losers and enhance their safety. If a woman is meeting you, assuredly she and her friends have stalked your online presence to the best of their ability.

She knows exactly where she is and her location tracking is on.”
– – – – –
When I suggested that looking for maternal acceptance gets in the way, he agreed, saying, “That’s most guys issue.  It’s also partly social conditioning via media and fantastical opinions of women in their lives.

Men should NEVER take dating advice from other women, and only generally in rare instances and on specific contexts.”

He then added, “Movies and TV are written for women, idealistically.  Showing up to a woman’s house playing a love song on the boom box outside her door is called stalking, but in the movies it’s romantic.  They have no idea what they actually want…”
____________

So there you go, solid advice from a successful player.

By the way, Corrie met his gal on the west coast of Canada while she was on a work/visit visa, something the commonwealth countries do. They used a dating app to meet.

He first matched her on Tinder, and she ignored him. Then he saw her on OKCupid… and got her attention there. He said he’d also been talking to a friend of hers at the time before meeting her. BINGO!

After a whirlwind couple of months, she took him to a ball game for his birthday towards the end of August and left for Ireland the next day. Her visa had expired.

They stayed in touch online and sure enough, she told him that if he came to visit for Christmas, she’d pay for half his ticket. This was an offer he couldn’t refuse, and so, he walked through that open door.

Upon his return in January, he called me and said, “Dad, I’m selling everything. Me and Mr. Newman are moving to Ireland.”

It’s been what? Seven, eight years? He’s been there ever since.

Thoughts? Comments?

true and free…
cw

Have a look at this graphic for more tips…

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Ice storm news: I had four trees and tree limbs come down in my backyard, all around the yard shed where I keep a Kawasaki Mule 4×4 and an almost new lawn tractor. None of the trees or limbs hit the shed and did damage. How nice is that?