Harris OMalley - New Game +: The Geeks Guide to Love, Sex, & Dating

Before you get started on your journey to building a new and better life, I wanted to give you some tips on how to get the most out of this book. Itll be tempting to leap around from section to section, focusing on specific sections. This will actually end up slowing your progress.

Dating is a holistic activity and this book is written to reflect this. Most dating issues dont stem from a lack of skill, but from deeply held negative attitudes and beliefs either about yourself or other people. My system helps you rebuild yourself from the inside out, focusing on your inner self before moving on to your exterior; skipping around means you run the risk of trying to treat the symptoms of your dating dilemmas rather than the underlying causes.

And while this is written for heterosexual men looking for romantic or sexual relationships, all of the advice herein can still apply on many levels for queer and platonic relationships.

I want to make this clear from the very start: no matter how bad you are at dating I was worse than you. Ive made just about every single mistake possible. Ive stewed in the bitter resentment that only a socially awkward geek with absolutely no facility with women can know. I watched girls Id harbored not-so-secret crushes on hook up with jocks and assholes who would go out of their way to flaunt their success in front of me. I was the prototypical geek: bookish and unathletic, with the sort of skin tone that can only be achieved by bathing in the cathode ray glow of the TV while playing hours of Super Nintendo.

Most importantly, I had little sense of style or how to relate to girls. In fact, it seemed as though Id carefully structured my life so as to make sex disappear. While everyone else was into sports, the high-school social scene, and who was hooking up with whom, I was into video games, comic books and anime. I didnt lack a sense of style so much as turn myself into a singularity from which no fashion sense could escape. I owned a Three Wolf Moon shirt. I was the proud owner of a silk not rayon, but honest-to-God silk shirt from Hot Topic with anime characters from X/1999 emblazoned on it. And I thought it was cooler than a penguins ass in ice cream.

My idea of flirting involved following the girl I liked like a lost puppy. I spent so much time in the Friend Zone that I could declare it my primary residence and run for political office there. There was not a single part of my life that didnt seem to be built to ensure that I would never see a woman naked in person.

Plus, I was surrounded by people who outclassed me in every way possible, which didnt help the continual crotch-kicks of my life. Most of my close friends were all naturally socially gifted. My brother was a jock. One of my oldest, dearest friends looked like the love-child of Hugh Grant and Rob Lowe and attracted women the way that cheese attracts mice. And then there was me: The One Who Wasnt Good With Girls. I was a Geek with a capital-G, pathetic, sexless and doomed to a life of permanent virginity and being like a brother to every girl I ever lusted after.

Naturally, I believed in the Dating Binary; either you were good with girls or you werent and there was simply no way to change this. Even attempting to try was guaranteed to mark you as a pathetic loser trying to rise above his station.

By the time I graduated from college, I had been in exactly one relationship, which turned so toxic that I ended up in therapy. For years after that break-up, I stumbled from one pathetic attempt at getting a girlfriend to another until the night it all changed for me. The night I had my Batman moment.

It was the night of my brothers wedding and I had developed a massive crush on one of the guests. Unfortunately, she had also caught the eye of my friend Miles the aforementioned Hugh Grant/Rob Lowe love-child. Full of young lust and a determination to win, Miles and I went head to head over her and I lost. And because the universe was powered by my tears, Miles happened to have the room next to mine. So as I sat there, listening to them, crying and masturbating while using my tears as lube, I resolved that this would never happen to me again. I demanded a sign, a sign from the universe

(by which I mean I googled How to get girls)

and I got my answer.

Where Bruce Wayne found inspiration from a bat crashing through his window, I found inspiration in a review of Neil Strauss The Game Penetrating The Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists. It was the first time that anyone ever explained that dating is a skill that even a geek like me could learn! I raised my fists to the sky and said, Yes, I shall become a pick-up artist!

I took to pick-up with the zeal of the newly converted. I changed my hair, tossed out my old wardrobe and started to rebuild my life from the ground up. After having spent so long believing that sex was something that happened to other people, I was determined that, by God, I was going to be the player I never thought I could be. I dove into the Austin bar and club scene like Templeton the Rat chowing down at the garbage smorgasbord that was the county fair and it made me fucking miserable.

I was getting laid like a bandit to be sure, but I wasnt happy at all. I was spending time in bars I hated surrounded by people I loathed, paying too much for beer, choking on cigarette smoke all in the name of getting my dick wet. Everything about my life became about pick-up. The majority of my social circle were my wingmen and fellow PUAs in town. Almost every conversation I had inevitably revolved back to the topic of pick-up. I was out three or four nights a week. I came home reeking of smoke, stale beer and a miasma of cologne and AXE body spray, with my head pounding and my ears ringing. If I scored that night, then I was on the top of the world but if I didnt, I was dragging the tattered remains of my ego home with me feeling lower than a snakes balls in a drainage ditch.

And the less said about how I was treating women, the better. Women were targets. They were gatekeepers, withholding access to the sex I wanted so I had to cajole or persuade them into giving it up. They were just about anything except actual people and so I treated them abominably.

It was only when I stepped away from the community that I started to recognize the problem and was able to fix things. I wasnt just having sex because Im a sexual person and it was part of who I was; I was using sex as validation. The more sex I had, the better a person I must be. When youre getting your validation from sex and using other people as a yardstick to measure your success, youre going to end up in a dark and unpleasant place.

This wasnt the answer; it was only a stepping stone along the way.

You see, the reason why guys respond to pick-up artistry is that there is so little worthwhile information out there for men who want to get better at dating. The traditional advice women want a nice guy, just be yourself, and youll find love when youre not looking is worse than useless. It actually retards a persons chances at finding love or sex by teaching them all of the wrong lessons. Pick-up, on the other hand, promises you results and gives you concrete ideas about what to do. It takes something that seems arcane and mysterious and makes it relatable. Even better, if youre a nerd, it turns social interaction into a formula. It demystifies everything and even better gives you specific things to say and do with pre-canned material, a progression model, even an idea of what you should be doing when heres when you touch her, heres when you should kiss her, heres when you should take her back to your room. If that seems kind of sketchy thats because it is. But when youre an awkward nerd who treats Ducky like his patron saint, being able to treat meeting women like running a raid on the Lich King is incredibly appealing. Its a frame of reference you can understand: Okay, shes thrown up her bitch-shield, you need to use a neg to bring it down, then apply kino to bring up her buying temperature.