[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
HOW-2 Meet Women
The Shy Man's Guide to Relationships
by
Cartaphilus
© 1999 by M\Cooper
All rights reserved
Introduction
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.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
First Steps
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 climb only 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 too 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.
Learning From Experience
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.
Recognize the dangers of overcorrecting for your aloneness, of prematurely throwing yourself into the
"social whirl" to break out of your isolation. You need stability and continuity in your life, and be
wary of disrupting familiar routine, lacking adequate preparation. Changing your life is a major
undertaking, and it will take time.
Defining Yourself
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 soulmate 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? Describe her personality. What special
appeal does she hold for you? 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
2
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.
"We are all of us poets and storytellers, making literature of our lives..."
Kelly Cherry
Realizations
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.
The less you need others, the more they will be attracted to you.
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 the scheme of things 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.
Become a "collector" of people. Enlarge your social circle. This means reaching out to strangers,
saying hello to persons unknown, and in general, meeting people and acquiring casual friends and
acquaintances. Making new contacts is sometimes difficult and always a little scary, but it pays off in
the long run - you never know who will introduce you to your next girlfriend. This is called
networking.
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.
Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet.
If some of the advice presented appears counterintuitive, it is because shyness bears its own
imperatives, and this necessitates viewing "the rules of engagement" of the dating game from an
3
unusual perspective, through the distorting lens of an outsider. You are already aware that you cannot
compete with your more socially adept peers on their own terms, and it follows that extraordinary
efforts are required... to even out the playing field and give you at least a fighting chance.
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
Chapter 1
Healing
They robbed you of your birthright. Family and peer group ripped from you at an early age the
innocent social adeptness of the young. The bullying and being "cut down to size" that passes for
socialization scarred your psyche. The fearful result is that you are not just shy, but painfully shy.
There is a place for shy, introspective persons. It is not a comfortable one. These are the creative ones,
the ones who develop their minds, the ones who think while others act. They are the ones taken for
granted, their worth unrecognized. They are the ones who cannot get dates...
"The consequences of shyness are deeply troubling. People for whom
shyness is an ongoing problem don't take advantage of social situations,
date less, are less expressive verbally and nonverbally, and show less
interest in other people..."
"The Encyclopedia of Mental Health", Henderson and Zimbardo
4
Remember the time you could not think of anything to say to the woman sitting across from you in
that little cafe. There was a painful
lump in your throat
, and you stammered when she looked your
way. She smiled at you sympathetically, but still, there was no way to reach out to her, to touch her...
and you lost yet another chance to make contact.
Remember that party, when you were standing off to one side by yourself, and the other people were
stealing brief glances at you over their shoulder, laughing quietly, giggling, some of them. You
approached several of the women, but quickly they found excuses to move away. Finally you walked
out into the bitter cold night air, only then to realize that your fly was open.
Remember leaving that one dance, and ahead of you, walking home, was the woman you had danced
with for hours. She met your eyes, momentarily, nearly smiled (you thought), but kept walking. You
could not quite summon up the courage to approach her, to ask if you could at least accompany her to
the nearest subway stop. She walked away into the night and out of your life.
...and all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.
Charles Wright
You Can't Get There From Here, Can You?
A gaping chasm splits off the landscape of the shy and lonely from the rest of humanity. This is the
great divide between losers and winners, so we are told. What radical transformation, then, would it
require to reshape a shy person into an extroverted, socially adept one? Where would you find the
kind savior to rescue you from the prison of your
loneliness
and tutor you in the social skills needed to
escape from the four walls of your own head? Where can you learn to care for, to
love another?
Personality change is virtually impossible under ordinary circumstances. Likewise, saviors are in
ridiculously short supply (and not so easy to recognize when they are found). What shapes your fate is
your own perceptions, your old ingrained habits of fear and failure. Others sense how you feel about
yourself and mirror your self-image back at you. Face yourself, know thyself, and take your life into
your own hands. Become a stronger person and depend no more on fortuitous happenstance, on
wishing and hoping.
We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glowworm.
Winston Churchill
Only the bridge of self-acceptance and understanding traverses the abyss isolating us from our fellow
humans. We shy people must of necessity become our own rescuers, teachers and saviors. Yet, if the
tools for self-transformation exist, they are difficult to use. Social skills can be learned, as a rule slowly
and sometimes painfully, but loneliness is a powerful motivator.
...less than ten percent of communication comes from the words that are said. The majority of the
message comes from nonverbal cues, like gestures, facial expressions and tone-of-voice. Individuals
who do not understand or use nonverbal communication appropriately are at a disadvantage in social
situations.
Marshall Duke
The useful social skills are but subtle elaborations of what we already know and do, yet of a somewhat
higher order. Obvious examples include listening, picking up on nonverbal cues, and having a sense of
5
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl adbuxwork.keep.pl
HOW-2 Meet Women
The Shy Man's Guide to Relationships
by
Cartaphilus
© 1999 by M\Cooper
All rights reserved
Introduction
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.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
First Steps
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 climb only 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 too 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.
Learning From Experience
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.
Recognize the dangers of overcorrecting for your aloneness, of prematurely throwing yourself into the
"social whirl" to break out of your isolation. You need stability and continuity in your life, and be
wary of disrupting familiar routine, lacking adequate preparation. Changing your life is a major
undertaking, and it will take time.
Defining Yourself
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 soulmate 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? Describe her personality. What special
appeal does she hold for you? 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
2
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.
"We are all of us poets and storytellers, making literature of our lives..."
Kelly Cherry
Realizations
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.
The less you need others, the more they will be attracted to you.
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 the scheme of things 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.
Become a "collector" of people. Enlarge your social circle. This means reaching out to strangers,
saying hello to persons unknown, and in general, meeting people and acquiring casual friends and
acquaintances. Making new contacts is sometimes difficult and always a little scary, but it pays off in
the long run - you never know who will introduce you to your next girlfriend. This is called
networking.
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.
Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet.
If some of the advice presented appears counterintuitive, it is because shyness bears its own
imperatives, and this necessitates viewing "the rules of engagement" of the dating game from an
3
unusual perspective, through the distorting lens of an outsider. You are already aware that you cannot
compete with your more socially adept peers on their own terms, and it follows that extraordinary
efforts are required... to even out the playing field and give you at least a fighting chance.
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
Chapter 1
Healing
They robbed you of your birthright. Family and peer group ripped from you at an early age the
innocent social adeptness of the young. The bullying and being "cut down to size" that passes for
socialization scarred your psyche. The fearful result is that you are not just shy, but painfully shy.
There is a place for shy, introspective persons. It is not a comfortable one. These are the creative ones,
the ones who develop their minds, the ones who think while others act. They are the ones taken for
granted, their worth unrecognized. They are the ones who cannot get dates...
"The consequences of shyness are deeply troubling. People for whom
shyness is an ongoing problem don't take advantage of social situations,
date less, are less expressive verbally and nonverbally, and show less
interest in other people..."
"The Encyclopedia of Mental Health", Henderson and Zimbardo
4
Remember the time you could not think of anything to say to the woman sitting across from you in
that little cafe. There was a painful
lump in your throat
, and you stammered when she looked your
way. She smiled at you sympathetically, but still, there was no way to reach out to her, to touch her...
and you lost yet another chance to make contact.
Remember that party, when you were standing off to one side by yourself, and the other people were
stealing brief glances at you over their shoulder, laughing quietly, giggling, some of them. You
approached several of the women, but quickly they found excuses to move away. Finally you walked
out into the bitter cold night air, only then to realize that your fly was open.
Remember leaving that one dance, and ahead of you, walking home, was the woman you had danced
with for hours. She met your eyes, momentarily, nearly smiled (you thought), but kept walking. You
could not quite summon up the courage to approach her, to ask if you could at least accompany her to
the nearest subway stop. She walked away into the night and out of your life.
...and all the various things that lock our wrists to the past.
Charles Wright
You Can't Get There From Here, Can You?
A gaping chasm splits off the landscape of the shy and lonely from the rest of humanity. This is the
great divide between losers and winners, so we are told. What radical transformation, then, would it
require to reshape a shy person into an extroverted, socially adept one? Where would you find the
kind savior to rescue you from the prison of your
loneliness
and tutor you in the social skills needed to
escape from the four walls of your own head? Where can you learn to care for, to
love another?
Personality change is virtually impossible under ordinary circumstances. Likewise, saviors are in
ridiculously short supply (and not so easy to recognize when they are found). What shapes your fate is
your own perceptions, your old ingrained habits of fear and failure. Others sense how you feel about
yourself and mirror your self-image back at you. Face yourself, know thyself, and take your life into
your own hands. Become a stronger person and depend no more on fortuitous happenstance, on
wishing and hoping.
We are all worms. But I do believe I am a glowworm.
Winston Churchill
Only the bridge of self-acceptance and understanding traverses the abyss isolating us from our fellow
humans. We shy people must of necessity become our own rescuers, teachers and saviors. Yet, if the
tools for self-transformation exist, they are difficult to use. Social skills can be learned, as a rule slowly
and sometimes painfully, but loneliness is a powerful motivator.
...less than ten percent of communication comes from the words that are said. The majority of the
message comes from nonverbal cues, like gestures, facial expressions and tone-of-voice. Individuals
who do not understand or use nonverbal communication appropriately are at a disadvantage in social
situations.
Marshall Duke
The useful social skills are but subtle elaborations of what we already know and do, yet of a somewhat
higher order. Obvious examples include listening, picking up on nonverbal cues, and having a sense of
5
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]