The Viable Alternative

It was the early 90s, the summer after my Freshman year in college, the month of August to be exact, and two friends of mine and I were walking around in the Village to talk to girls.

We were walking east towards Broadway, coming from Washington Square Park, and walking towards us were these two femme girls holding hands.

“Aww, that’s so beautiful,” says one.

“Yea man, I love that,” says the other.

My response was slightly different.

“F*cking bitches, they started holding hands because they want us to think they’re lesbians so we don’t try to talk to them! F*ck them!” I spew out in anger.

My friends rightfully look at me then each other in utter confusion as if I had just said that Elvis Presley was alive and well and living in my basement, and one says, “Uh dude, where’d that come from?”

Psychotically trying to justify my anger as some sort of female conspiracy against me, I exclaim, “They were holding hands like we were sweating them or something! Who do they think they are? F*ck those snotty bitches”

They look even more confused and one of them says to me in his trademark mellow voice like he was high on weed (which he probably was), “Ike man, you gotta work on your self esteem.”

Befuddled at my friends’ “naivete”, I ask, “What the hell does this have to do with self esteem? These were stuck up bitches!”

Umm….yeah.

As you can see, back then I was quite an angry bastard to say the least, but before any lady who is reading this that knows me decides to get a restraining order against me, block me on Facebook, and warn all your girlfriends to run FAR away from this psychopath, and before those of you who don’t know me label me as a potential serial killer, consider the context I was coming from.

One of the dudes I was with who was four years younger than me, had lost his virginity at 12 years old, at the age of 13 he was having sex quite regularly, was constantly getting love letters from girls in school who were crushing on him, girls would approach him when he was out and about on a regular basis trying to kick it to him, and 4 out 5 girls he knew or met thought he was cute.

The other guy was a year older than me, and from as far back as I remember, always had a way with the ladies. He always had a girlfriend, was regularly meeting girls when he went out, and he just had this smooth confidence about him. In fact, we were out in the Village because he wanted to show me how you meet women when walking around.

These two gentlemen had carte blanche in the land of women. They walked around freely and harmoniously. They loved the company of women, and the women loved being in their company.

Then there was me.

My introduction into the “land of women” was accompanied with ridicule and scorn starting from the age of 12 when I started to develop what would eventually become severe cystic acne that lasted until I was almost 16. At 13 and on, words like “homely” and “ugly” were freely used by girls to describe me either to friends of mine or directly to my face. No girl would want to kiss me hello on the cheek like they did to other guys because they were grossed out by my acne and didn’t want to risk rubbing against it and having one of my huge cystic zits explode on them. While the girls would flirt with other guys, I was basically ignored or treated with an active indifference.

Thus, in high school I was totally terrified of women and afraid to talk to them. The few times girls did approach me starting when I was 16, I thought they were playing a joke. I could not even fathom in my head a woman actually finding me attractive any more than I could fathom right now singing the Iranian national anthem in Farsi.

So here I was at 19, the awkwardness of puberty was gone but the emotional scars remained. While it seemed that all the friends I had in college were successful with women, I was still totally clueless and scared of women and got rejected on a regular basis.

To me, women were symbols of rejection, fear and humiliation, and I was angry at them for it. They weren’t to be trusted and were threats to my almost non-existent self esteem.

THIS was the guy who uttered those angry words.

Things Finally “Click”

Fast forward one year later, the summer after my sophomore in college. I had almost failed out of school due to a long bout of depression, but I was back home and actually a lot happier. I started hanging out a lot more with my college friends and their friends who I all looked up to because they were very successful with women.

Observing how they were each successful in their own unique way, with their own individual styles, personalities and tastes with women gave me my first click at 20 years old. It made me recognize my own individuality and appreciate it for the first time in my life and made me wonder and get inspired by what type of success it could bring me.

Fast forward another six months, and I had another insight: I can appoint myself the right to be successful and not look for others to give me the permission.

With these two insights, combined with a much more positive outlook on life, watching what my friends did and imbibing the attitudes they had that made them successful with women, the floodgates started to open.

There were the smiles, winks and outright staring from random women on the street. There were the women who would approach me on the street and offer me their number after brief conversation. There were the outward compliments about my eye and hair colour.

There were the women who would approach me in clubs and take me back home with them with me doing little to no work at all. There were the random adventures where I’d meet a girl on the street and get busy with her within minutes.

There was the hooking up your boy with a threesome with a girl who would do anything for me. There was the three way kisses with two lipstick lesbians. There was the gang bangs during which you and your boys are nakedly high fiving one another.

There was the becoming an idol to one of my little cousins who saw me in action when I took him out with me and my friends on one of our adventures.

And then there was what I wanted since I was 13, what I considered as my crowing achievement, my very own girlfriend.

Considering how low I started, it was truly like a dream.

But you know what?

Despite all this “success,” I still was afraid of women.

Though I never admitted it to myself, deep down inside I still felt like the same guy women ignored when I was a teenager. I had this fear that if women got to see the “real me,” they’d immediately run in the other direction.

On top of that, since I learned how to talk to girls from friends who were players, I picked up many of their habits which included proudly lying to women, manipulating them, playing with their feelings, and having absolutely no respect for them. I thus resented women for now being attracted to me as the guy who I had once logically assumed shouldn’t be able to attract women because they were liars, cheaters and manipulators but did anyway – the guys who women used to completely reject me for, the guys who women would constantly complain about and cry over because the guy was being a douchebag to them but continue to chase anyway.

Now I knew what I was doing, women went from objects of fear, humiliation and rejection to tools of validation whom I can use to feel like “the man,” get “props” from my boys, make up for all those “lost” years of being a loser, and as disturbing as it may sound, get revenge on for the way they treated me in the past.

________

“Bitches talk shit!”

“All women are hoes.”

“Bitches are only good for one thing.”

“I ain’t got no respect for women.”

“I don’t trust these hoes.”

In the midst of the combined aroma of alcohol and reefer and the cacophony of 40 bottles clanking, lighters being flicked to spark blunts and the boisterous voices of young men in their late teens and early 20s trying to impress one another with their breadth of knowledge and experience with women, phrases like these were gratuitously bandied about followed by unanimous howls of approval by everyone else involved in these various impromptu meetings of minds I was privy to during these years.

Funny, you may think that these dudes who said things like this did poorly with women, but on the contrary, a lot of these guys who were saying these things were quite successful, and had women chasing them.

I would guess though, that deep down inside, these guys had the same fears and insecurities about women that I did, and were trying to hide them as well.

Things Fall Apart

Well eventually, the girl I was with came to her sense and wisely dumped me, and because it triggered all sorts of childhood trauma about being abandoned and left alone, I was devastated. When my pathetically desperate entreaties for her to take me back because I was going to change came to naught, I gave up trying to convince her, and went through this bizarre period of my life.

Feeling thoroughly guilty of who I had been, I had resolved to change from being “that” guy whose girlfriend left him. I gave up chasing women to the point I was totally utterly indifferent to them, took a vow of celibacy that lasted over two years, threw out any behaviour that reminded me of the person who I was, and basically became this “nice,” meek guy who in order to make sure that I wasn’t being that “horrible” person I thought I was, became so overly conscious of every move I made and word I spoke that I started to act like a robot.

Life became totally dull, vanilla and totally uninspiring, but to me, that was okay, because at least I wasn’t being “that guy” anymore, and more like someone that my ex would take back with open arms if I ever ran into her again.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that if my ex ever did see me again and I succeeded in getting back with her, she probably would’ve dumped me again shortly after because this time, I would’ve been “too nice’ and overly compliant that it would’ve turned her completely off. I didn’t understand that the real issue was that I was emotionally unavailable and afraid to open my heart to anyone, and that needed to be addressed through therapy, not by throwing the baby out with the bathwater (the baby being my core self) and also beating myself up over and over again over my past mistakes.

Anyway, I finally came to my senses a few years later and decided to go and live a “normal” male in his 20s, and start dating once more, but things weren’t that simple. Not only did I find I was clueless once more to the point I even “forgot” how to get a girl’s number, but also, I had put up so many mental blocks against myself when I was trying to change that I now found that I couldn’t escape them and just go back to being normal.

My mind became my perpetual prison that I couldn’t escape and I was constantly trapped in a loop of overthinking. No amount of self improvement books I read, and visualizations, positive thinking and affirmations I did were able to help. Things I took for granted in the past like being spontaneous, charismatic, charming, and being able to access my other gifts and resources to attract women (and be a normal human being) were now virtually impossible. Thus, with an inability to get out of my head and connect to myself, I could barely carry on a conversation with a woman never mind even connect with her.

Living with myself was truly like a living hell.

Looking for answers to how to overcome this, I eventually wound up turning to the Seduction Community to learn lines, techniques and methods on how to talk to women to fill in the void that was left with the inability to connect to myself.

This even weirded women out more because they could sense something was off about me.

In essence, from 2000-2009, the “lost decade,” with the exception of a few “lucky” instances here and there, my dating life was almost non-existent. I once again was privy to watching all my friends have the fun while I stood on the sidelines hopeless.

Please, anyone who knew me during this time please forget every interaction we had. I’m sorry you knew me during this time.

The Clouds Finally Part

Then, in 2009, I had a huge, life saving spiritual cleansing (another story for another time), followed by a few more years of spiritual healing, which in turn was followed by what is now a year and a half of ongoing therapy. This is all helping me to heal and gradually connect to my true authentic self which is giving me the space to gradually change my relationship with women from one of fear, misunderstanding and ignorance to one of connection, respect, and “sort of” understanding women.

I say “sort of” because I don’t think I’ll ever TRULY understand women. Shoot, women say they don’t fully understand women, so why should this weirdo writing this blog?

So what helped bridge the gap?

It was the numerous conversations I had with women where they shared with me their insecurities, doubts, frustrations and misunderstandings about men and dating.

It was going out night after night and getting it hammered into my head that my most successful interactions came as a result of being my true, authentic self i.e. no fancy lines, just being a normal human being respectfully talking to another human being without apology about who I am.

It was hearing women I was dating telling me specific things I did that made them attracted to me.

It was hearing the things I did wrong with women that I was involved with.

In the same vein, it was also hearing other women tell me about what their past and present boyfriends/spouses and men they dated did right and wrong.

It was after years of trial and error (mostly error), of finally learning how to write an online dating profile that actually spoke to women. You see, women’s brains work differently than men’s, so most men fail at online dating because they’re not reaching women with what they write. When it finally “clicked,” the dating site where I had my profile emailed me telling me my profile was one of the most popular profiles on the site.

It was having a female mentor who was able to make me see a woman’s point of view in various situations I had.

It was dating amazing women who impressed me by who they were and what they accomplished and made me a better person from having dated them. They also spoiled me into not settling for a “lower quality” woman by showing me what a high quality woman is really about and that they are indeed out there.

It was learning how to handle a disagreement with a woman where she felt “heard” rather than “judged” and at the same time respected me for standing my ground.

To attract an amazing woman, you either have to be an amazing man or an amazing manipulator”
-Unknown

From initially being sources of fear and suspicion and tools of validation, I came to see women as amazing feminine beings with their own dreams, hopes, desires, fears, talents, etc. that intrigue me, inspire me, and continuously pique my curiosity to learn more who they are and what makes them tick. I admire their ability to nurture, their intuition, and believe that a truly powerful, feminine woman can help a man develop and grow in his masculinity in a way that no other man can (and of course this goes the other way around as well).

I now have a lot of female friends – some I was involved with in the past, some completely platonic as in it’ll never go anywhere, and some admittedly, if left up to me, would go “somewhere.” I love and respect all these women and some I truly owe a debt of gratitude for helping me launch the last event I did this past event called, “Expressions of Divinity” – Ike Love Holiday Showcase/Photo Exhibition.

Thus, when I hear successful people like Dame Dash, ex CEO of Rockafella Records and former business partner of Jay-Z says he mostly likes surrounding himself with women because of how supportive they can be in helping you accomplish your goals, I see what he’s saying.

Yes, I still have commitment issues, yes I still have A LOT to learn about women, yes I still have some deep seated trust issues, and if you know me or have read my previous blogs, you’d know that I still have my challenges being vulnerable to women. However, I see these as opportunities that I can use to grow into a man that is able to give so much value that I’m able to leave a woman as better than when I first met her or have a profound positive effecton the life of the woman I choose for a life partner.

This is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps,

Ike Love

p.s.

Several years ago, one of the friends I was with who was in the story I told at the beginning of this blog, called me on the phone and asked that I take him with me the next time I was going out at night because after an incident in which he saw a woman standing in front of a building that he wanted to approach but couldn’t because he was too nervous and clueless as to what to say, he decided he needed to go out more to become more comfortable cold approaching women. When we eventually went out, while I was totally relaxed and comfortable talking to the women around me, he was totally self conscious and stiff and remarked as to how awkward he sounded when he did contribute to the conversations I got into. My response was, “Dude, you’re thinking WAY too much, just loosen up have a good time.”

How tables turn huh? It’s not how you enter a room, but how you leave it.