Alex Forrest - Too Late, Mate?: Dating Advice for Men - a Daygame Memoir

Alex Forrest

Too Late, Mate?

A Daygame Memoir

Copyright 2019 by Alex Forrest

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

Second edition

Editing by Harry Althoff
Proofreading by Danielle Anderson
Illustration by Nate Fakes
Cover art by Rebeca Covers

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
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Alex Forrest is a lawyer and writer who was born in Colchester, Essex in 1967, the son of a wealthy local businessman. He moved to London, graduated from London University with a First Class Degree, was admitted to The Bar in 1993 and thereafter embarked on a successful career as a lawyer. Surprisingly, no one took the trouble to explain to him that there were, in fact, better ways to get into bed with beautiful women

Danielle Anderson, Nate Fakes and Slaven Kovacevic for actually managing to hit a rather tight deadline and to hit it rather well! And thanks to Harry Althoff for manfully persevering through a debut book, full of all sorts of editorial challenges.

Thanks to Ian and Tom for their wholehearted encouragement.

And of course

Andy Yosha and Daygame.com.

This true story charts my journey into the world of women and dating via Daygame. Daygame is a method used to approach women in the daytime, whether on the street, in shops or cafes. It could also be called daytime approach, to distinguish it from the many other ways of approaching women and getting dates.

The word Game is of course itself loaded and immediately arouses associations of pick-up artists using tricks to seduce women, which they then peddle to clueless men for a price. But whilst I certainly met some colourful characters during my adventures, I found that most of the guys who got into daygame simply wanted to get a handle on women and dating. They felt disillusioned, even alienated, by the conventional wisdom in this area. They realised there was no quick-fix but that they probably needed to do some work on themselves. It was a rite-of-passage for them, not the end goal.

As for me, at the time I discovered daygame I was a 46-year-old guy who truly believed that I was at the end of the road in terms of being successful with women. I had been a relationship virgin all my life and was desperate for a girlfriend. Apart from a brief period of accidental success at University (in common with many men) my dating record was parlous. Over the years since leaving University it got worse and worse until it dried up altogether. In the 15 years prior to writing this book, I simply had no sex life to speak of. This was in spite of success in other areas.

So I was really desperate. I was on the way to 50, and I had tried everything from life coaching and counselling to meditation and group therapy. I even ended up with a spirit medium in conversation with the ghost of my dead step-father! I had had countless conversations with countless friends (many married or in long-term relationships) and had begun to feel like a real misfit. I had hit on so many women and been on so many dates with so little success that the whole thing had started to become almost comical (albeit a black comedy). Nothing seemed to work to fix the problem and I eventually became convinced that nothing could change. I was doomed. I was clearly just not one of those guys and never would be. I began to identify completely with my status as a sad, sorry character. I had issues, clearly, that marked me out as a loser in this area. I became fatalistic and started to conclude that I had better just suck it up and get on with life.

Of course, one advantage of being at a low point is that you are willing to try anything. It may be desperation, but the willingness to try something different is nevertheless there. So it was that I stumbled onto pick-up artistry.

But here was a problem: as an intellectual with a good education and a career as a professional lawyer, I was firmly part of the establishment and I was deeply entrenched against the very idea of the pick-up community. Whilst I was aware of books like Neil Strausss The Game, where guys learned skills and tricks in order to get laid, and whilst I had of course surfed the internet and YouTube, it all seemed way too seedy and sketchy for me. These guys were losers, surely? Reading The Game during my search for solutions only fortified me in this belief. The book pilloried these guys, portraying them all as nut jobs.

Still, as I said, I was desperate. And I had exhausted all other options. So, rather gingerly at first, I started to dip into this world.

And so it was that I stumbled on Andy Yosha, Tom Torero and Daygame.com. Daygame.com was a company with a strong online presence. They taught men how to approach girls during the daytime and it was all quite different from the night-gamers depicted by Strauss. They all seemed surprisingly normal. Daygame.com sold the concept as a rite of passage that men needed to go through. They explained that the ideas and conditions prevalent in modern society prevented men from ever going through this rite of passage. Worse, society had hoodwinked them. It was reminiscent of the film Fight Club: guys who were into this stuff lived in an underground world, feeling that society had let them down and that they needed to acquire a secret knowledge that others lacked.

These guys might be colourful geeks, misfits, or eccentrics, but they were not the pick-up artists ridiculed in the media as sketchy narcissists who preyed on women. Most of them were regular dudes who had turned their lives around in this area, having become frustrated with their own terrible dating histories, and were now teaching it professionally and even with a certain missionary zeal. Many of them were really smart and spoke articulately and intelligently as if they were somehow part of a shadowy dating academy. (Society would never have allowed them university-status.) They lectured other dudes, saying that guys needed to know this stuff and had been handicapped in life by being kept from the knowledge. Men needed to reclaim this lost area of their manhood.

It was then that I began to realise that there was more to this whole thing than going out and hitting on girls and getting laid. I was about to embark on an uncomfortable ride in terms of having to swallow some difficult truths that clashed with those socially-conditioned ideas promulgated by society and accepted by a lot of men (and women) without a second thought. In the process I would find many of my own, dearly-held ideas dismantled.

As decades of fixed thinking came under attack and I took action it also actually seemedin terms of the challenge of my particular journey as a guy in his late fortiesthat the impossible might become the possible.

I might be able to transform my life and become successful with women. Even at my age it might not be, too late, mate.

The London Daygame Model, as it is called, is the technique that I was taught.

My story begins one Sunday afternoon in January 2014. I was sitting in my gloomy office on Southwark Street staring out of the window at a couple of pigeons pecking at the grey pavement, twiddling my mobile phone in my fingers. Should I call?

I had been battling with the pain of my latest girl problem by burying myself in my work, without success

Gotia was a pretty, petite Polish girl, and I had been trying to date her for the best part of 18 months. I was on to Date 10 (at least!) In all that time I had not even kissed her, let alone had sex with her. I had of course bought her gifts, taken her to the theatre, and bought her dinner. And strangely, in spite of all these excellent gestures of interest and commitment, she had not reciprocated with physical affection. And even more strangely, it felt that with each passing date it was becoming less and less likely that she would