Alex Anders - How to Win the Love Game: A User-Friendly Guide to Rekindle Your Love and Help Others Fall in Love with You

Preface

I have something to confess to you. I have never been in a long term relationship. So, you might be wondering why Im writing a book called How to Win the Love Game. Thats a good question.

The truth is that I have thought about this topic a lot. I have a long history of not winning the love game, and it was the frustration that I felt from constantly losing that made me sit down and figure out what it would take to win.

This book looks at love from a neuro-chemical perspective. Often times I will share stories about the things that Ive done wrong and why it was wrong. And by reading this book, Im hoping that you recognize some of your own behavior which prevents you from winning the love game. And I hope that this book puts you on the path to finding love and making better decisions about what you want.

But, before I get to the heart of the matter, I thought I would share with you my challenges with love. They involve a specific set of circumstances which, it could be argued, couldnt have led me anywhere else but here, writing this book. In those challenges, you will see many of the concepts that will be addressed later.

My journey to writing this book had to have begun when I was 13 years old. That was when I hit puberty. That was also around the time that I discovered something about myself that would shape everything about the rest of my life. That was when I began to get signs that I was bisexual.

As a young black, boy growing up in the Bahamas (the country which once banded the movie Harry Potter for being about witchcraft) wasnt easy. It was well known that if the police caught two men kissing, they would beat them up for it. The homophobia was as bad as anywhere in the world, and my starting to have sexual desires for boys wasnt a welcomed feeling.

What made my bisexuality even more confusing was what I would discover later. The truth was that no matter who I met, I never had more than sexual feelings for guys. I had had debilitating crushes on a number of girls along with some sexual feelings for girls. But my feelings for guys remained strictly sexual.

What did this mean? Was I gay because my sexual attraction to guys was stronger than my sexual attraction to women? Was I just a straight guy with wild oats to sow since I felt nothing emotionally towards men? Or, was I just screwed and doomed to either live a lie or to forever be alone?

Another issue which shaped my romantic life was something Im sure that many of you can relate to. During my formative years, my parents marriage was falling apart. I witnessed a number of things that a boy my age should never have to experience while forming his self-image. And although I am grateful for everything that my mother has done for me, there is no getting around the fact that her treatment of father shaped the trust issues that I continue to struggle with today.

The final issue that has led me to the creation of this book is something that you probably wont be able to relate to. It took me years to figure out, and once I did, a lot of things in my life made sense. I am whats referred to as dopamine insensitive. Later on, I will deep dive into what dopamine is and how it relates to winning the love game. But for now, I will explain the way our body regulates this neuro-chemical with an analogy.

Imagine a music concert. On stage is the singer and she is singing into a microphone. Behind the scenes is a sound mixer. It is the sound mixers responsibility to ensure that the audience can always hear the singer, and that the music never gets uncomfortably loud for the audience.

To do that, the sound mixer sits in front of a sound board with a lot of sliding levers. One of those sliding levers is called the gain. When the singer sings a quiet song, the sound mixer pushes up the gain. When the singer yells into the microphone, the sound mixer lowers the gain.

As any good sound mixer will tell you, you dont continuously raise and lower the gain as soon as you notice a difference. A good sound mixer will listen and observe whats going on for a moment. Once they have determined that the singer will be quieter for a continued stretch of time, they increase the gain. And once they have had to lower the gain, they are slow to again increase the gain to baseline levels.

Well, this is how our brains receptors work. When our body releases neuro-chemicals and hormones, our bodys receptors play the role of the sound mixer. When our body is flooded with excess amounts of a neuro-chemical like dopamine, our gain is lowered. And in the case of people like me who are dopamine insensitive, our sound mixers are quick to lower the level of our gain, while also being overly cautious about returning our receptors levels to baseline.

This condition results in a particular set of behaviors. Im sure youve heard of adrenaline junkies. They are people who jump out of planes and take unnecessary risks. Im sure youve also heard of drama queens. They are people who always manage to stir up controversy no matter where they are.

Both adrenaline junkies and drama queens are people who need more and more dopamine to feel normal. And once they lose their high source of dopamine, they will feel depressed, even if people without their condition would consider the same situation thrilling. These people are considered dopamine insensitive.

For years I was dopamine insensitive and didnt know it. The first hints of it were when I was a sophomore in college. It was then when I began working as a professional actor. The pattern which developed was that I would get an audition and it would make me feel ecstatic. I would ride that wave throughout the audition process and the job. But as the weeks would pass without another audition, I would get more and more depressed.

If it took too long before the next call from my agent, things would get dark. I can remember times when I thought about laying on top of the sink and slitting my wrists until the life drained out of me. The thought would grow until my agent inevitably called again. After that, the exhilaration-darkness cycle would reset and the countdown to darkness would begin again.

After graduation from college, the source of my dopamine rushes changed depending on what was available to me. There was a time when I couldnt get enough beach volleyball and racquetball. There was a time when I would ride my motorcycle at 40 mph between the cars on L.A.s 405 freeway. And there were still other times when I experienced the same cyclical pattern with sex.

It was those three conditions, my bisexuality, my trust issues, and my dopamine insensitivity, which have prevented me from ever being in long term relationships. And, it is those three things that have led me to this book. Freud, the father of psychotherapy, didnt research the mind because he was a well-adjusted person. He did it because he was driven to understand himself.