From reading my blog and others, it’s easy to conclude that male behavior is either white or black. If you’re beta then you’re a virgin who will never get laid. If you’re alpha then women want you to cum inside them on a Colombian bus.

It’s more accurate to say that alpha-beta qualities fit on a line, with a multitude of traits determining if you lean alpha or lean beta.

I still have many beta traits. Off the top of my head:

• I get sentimental easily, making short relationships more important in my mind than they really are.
• I can be overly affectionate, both verbally and physically, which usually turns off Western women.
• I don’t let girls pay (as long as I have money), even if they have a decent job.
• I’m willing to travel long distances to have sex with a woman that I like.

These are qualities that I’m no longer working on eliminating because I’ve learned that they do not hurt my chances with women who are my type. While being overly affectionate may cost me with an American girl, it does not with Colombian, Brazilian, and Polish women, who are overly affectionate themselves. If I want to sleep with American women, I consciously make changes to my “problem” traits to ensure I still get laid.

I’ve learned that it’s okay for a man to have many beta traits as long as his behavior does not stem from insecurity. If he’s beta because he longs for assurances and acceptance, he will have a problem getting women no matter what, but if his beta traits are quirks of his nature that make him have a “soft heart,” then he will not be punished as severely.

The beta who gets laid does things with women because that’s who he is and that’s what he wants to do with his women. The beta who doesn’t get laid does things because he’s trying to win her over or overcompensate for his insecurities. It’s not the behavior but the intent behind it that gets interpreted and judged by women. They can feel the difference between a man who says he likes her because he enjoys her company or the man who says that because he’s hoping she will like him back.

If you’re a hopelessly sentimental beta, there are three traits you must have if you want to be sexually succesful in a Western country:

1. Confidence. You must have a high opinion of yourself. This is built from success in sports, weight training, or fucking. It also comes from completing ambitious projects.

2. Approach Skill. You must have enough interactions with the opposite sex to meet a girl who is buying what you’re selling (your personality or look). I don’t care how confident you are, but you’re not going to get laid if you don’t meet enough women.

3. Sexual Persistence. You can’t wait all day for a girl to make it be known that she wants to have sex with you. You must make it happen by constantly escalating in the face of her token resistance.

After mastering these traits you can throw in other things like style, proper venue selection, tighter game, coolness and so on to become a more valuable man that gets frequently chosen for sex. But then again I wonder if any man who has confidence, approach skill, and sexual persistence can still be classified as “beta.” Either way, it’s very rare for the most alpha of alphas not to have at least a beta trait or two simmering underneath their armor.

When I’m in America I actively repress my beta urges, and it’s not hard because of the antagonistic feelings I have with the women I meet there, but in a place like Poland I let beta Roosh run wild and free to be rewarded with more sex than ever. It’s an amazing thing to sincerely compliment a woman, kiss her with passion, and divulge your feelings for her to receive mind-blowing sex and her desire to get into a relationship with you. In America that simply does not happen.

It comes down to identifying the beta traits you have and finding out if they are costing you sex or not. If they are, can you work on changing or minimizing them? Do you want to change or minimize them? If not then either you have to accept less sex or move to a place where those traits are wanted, such as South America or Eastern Europe. Minimize or move—pick one.

Read Next: 7 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Game Right Now

I met an Irishman at the Colombian university where I studied Spanish. He was a nice guy and I invited him to the food court area to hang out for a bit. He was fluent in Spanish and I complimented his ability and picked his brain a little.

The topic got onto girls and I told him night game is inefficient in Medellin and that my strategy focuses on approaching girls during the day. He was curious of course and I showed him how to do it by approaching a group of three girls next to us in Spanish. The girls invited me to sit at their table and about five minutes in I introduced the Irishman.

He almost fucked it up. He started talking way too much and not giving the girls a chance to answer, and with my inferior Spanish I was being pushed out of the conversation. He had no apparent technique and the girls appeared disinterested, adding no more than a phrase or two during breaks in his monologue. I knew I made a mistake by approaching with an unknown wingman, but I maintained my cool and only spoke when I had something insanely witty or funny to say. This set up a little contrast where I was obviously the more interesting gringo.

It’s hard enough maintaining a conversation with four other people in English, let alone in Spanish. The conversation was dying out. Before it got painfully awkward I ended it by saying we’re getting back to our studies. The Irishman didn’t object because he had since ran out of things to say.

He left soon after that, leaving me alone. Five minutes later the cutest girl stares at me and says, “You can sit and study with us if you want.” I moved back to their table and for the next half hour I’m doing my work with little breaks of talking to them. Since there were other girls I had to work the subtle tip and ask for everyone’s email address to stay in touch with the cute one, suggesting we hang out at some bar they mentioned earlier. I wasn’t too concerned since I’ve had a bit of success with email addresses in Medellin before.

The girls went to class and the Irishman swung by later. Apparently pumped up by my theories and sample approach, he ended up talking to a girl on some grassy area.

“Yeah it was going well, but I didn’t ask for her number,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I don’t no. I’m an idiot I should’ve.”

Eventually he asked for my phone number and I got his. I’d hang out with him again during the day but at night I rather go out solo dolo than with a beginner who needs heavy pickup instruction.

Three hours later he calls me. Strange, I thought, but I picked up.

“Hey Roosh how’s it going?” he said.

“Pretty good. What’s up?”

“You know those emails you got today?”

“Yeah what about them?”

“Can you give me the email of the [cutest girl]?”

I paused for a few seconds to digest his request. I was eating an avocado with a light dusting of salt from my bed while watching reggaeton music videos. I know that reggaeton uses Spanish that is not exactly up to formal standards, but it keeps me on top of the language.

“Are you joking?” I said.

“No I just thought you didn’t like her.”

“Huh? You think I did all that work for you?”

“Uhhh I thought you liked the other girl.”

“Nope.”

“Oh, okay then. Well maybe I’ll see you tomorrow at school?”

When I got off the phone I deleted his number. I spent the time to explain to him a skill that can get him a thousand numbers, but because he views women as scarce and highly desirable, he wanted to go all-in for this one email address on a girl that he neither approached nor closed.

A lot of guys who study game are concerned that once the information is out there, all these other guys will do it and then decrease the overall value of game. But most guys don’t have what it takes to improve and to change. Most guys don’t have balls (or even the proper work ethic), and even though they know that game works and it’s something they should do, they remain harmless threats to those men who remain fighting in the trenches.

Read Next: 7 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Game Right Now

If you want to get a tattoo you have answer yes to the following question:

Have you ever been into a fight as an adult?

Otherwise you should reconsider.

The popularity of tattoos is at the point where you see a lot of skinny, frail men getting them. Before I came to Colombia I remember witnessing the jarring sight of an emaciated man wearing a horizontal striped shirt with a rainbow colored sleeve tat (his sleeves were rolled up). My suspicion is that men like him are getting tats to appear tough.

“I’m not going to work on building my confidence, go to the gym, or even approach girls. I’m just going to get this here outrageous tat and graduate to being a bad ass right away! Where my groupies at!”

The only man I know who is qualified to have a tattoo is Virgle Kent, the most violent, ill-tempered man I know. Do you have a friend who considers getting a beer bottle smashed on his head the warm-up to a fight? Well I do (true story). He breaks heads up and down 18th Street with frightening regularity and that’s why he’s my buddy.

Today’s tattoo trend is reducing the value of his tattoos. The only way to rectify the problem is if guys like VK grab tatooed betas by the collar and demand they laser it off. He can pull a Fight Club and take their drivers license and say he’ll visit soon to check on them. Or he can use a piece of glass from the street to carve up their tat right then and there, leaving the wannabe tough guy in a pool of his own tears and blood.

In twenty years, when even your mom has a tattoo, I’m afraid it will not convey the bad ass qualities as before (for proof take a look at what happened to the mohawk). Instead, only those who know how to cave in faces will be seen as cool.

“I used to feel so alone in the city. All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside. Because how do you meet a new person? I was very stumped by this for many years. And then I realized, you just say “Hi.” They may ignore you. Or you may marry them. And that possibility is worth that one word.”
-Augusten Burroughs, author of Running With Scissors

It took him “many years” to get the courage to say hi to someone. What’s sadder is that he’s a best selling author, meaning people identify with him. The average person is a coward.

I know we have a whole year left but I got an interesting email from a guy who has been reading me for ages, before blogs were known as blogs. He informs me that Shlonglor, one of the internet’s first celebrity gamer geeks, knocked up a girl who is now destroying his life. In addition to his child, he’s raising her 6-year-old from a previous relationship, calling the kid his own.

Let’s take a closer look.

So I give her $400 for groceries, next day she wants money. She was supposed to take some of the money up to her moms and use it for groceries this month so her mom wouldn’t have to pay for everything. She spent $100 in one day here. She just took another $100 and she wants another $50. I bought airline tickets for $800, GPS/Camera (like $500). It never ends.

See I’m buying a house and It’s like $3,100 a month vs. $2,000 a month for my current rent. When I met her I was at $1,200 a month. She doesn’t have a job so it’s up to me. :(

I’m going to have to pay like $800 to move, get a washer, dryer, fridge. I have to pay like $800 to get out of the apartment. I have $77/month college loan payment coming up, I have $3k on my credit card because of all these bullshit purchases, and I owe $1k on car insurance. She’s getting us another loan to help stay alive that I have to pay back within a year.

It’s a horrible time for me to buy a house… I should say no but this is the only time I can probably get a decent place where I got it. She keeps saying that if you wait, you might never see interest rates like this. She might be right. We’ll see.

She made him buy a house during the biggest housing bust since the Great Depression. Ouch.

I got rid of cable, netflix, gametap. That’s like $150.

She made him give up everything that kept his meek existence the least bit enjoyable.

I will eventually in a year get like 10k back in taxes for the house but that’s a long time to survive until then. I’m thinking of borrowing some money from my 401k despite it being down $40k.

What a shitty way to live.

He confesses in the comments that he complains about his girlfriend online so that she’ll see it and hopefully get the hint. Fucking epitome of beta. A man who doesn’t stand up for himself and instead cries on a blog with sad emoticons deserves nothing but total ruin. Get a spine man! Stop giving that bitch money! The only question is if she will be able to find a bigger beta to raise his kid once he’s reduced to living in his Honda.

If you’re wondering why a man would put up with this sort of thing, it’s the same reason why women stay with men who slap them across the face from time to time. Low self-esteem, low confidence. They think they can’t do better and that they’re lucky with whatever they got.

I believe he has reached the point of no return where no amount of advice or game will change the outcome. Helping him would be like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

Michael Phelps has a girlfriend, a former Miss California runner-up. Is she a ten? Let’s take a look.

“I won a hundred gold medals and all I got was this 7.”

Thank god for game.

Postscript: It has come to my attention that the second picture is not Michael Phelps’ girlfriend. My bad.

My hostel in Cordoba, Argentina was full of guys who were cocky motherfuckers. It was harder to differentiate myself from the pack when our styles of game was so similar. If you liked a gringo girl there, which was rare since the natives are so much more beautiful than chubby English girls, you’d have to fight three other guys who were working on her as well. It became important that the quality of what we spit become important. Simply teasing wasn’t good enough—you had to be an accomplished tease and bring out your best material.

At the Reef bar in D.C., pick up artist central for those training in semi-underground lairs, most of the guys use the exact same game since they are learning from each other. Being “cocky and funny” is one of the first things they learn so you have a dozen of them every weekend to the Reef desensitizing the girls there to the that type of approach.

This bar is the exception. In most other places you don’t girls who have this intense shield to game, but in five or ten years I can see it becoming like this is most bars in large cities. Will game eventually become ineffective?

No, if case you were wondering. Game will always perform better than being a spineless beta male who can’t even do his manly duty to approach a cute girl he likes. Though I believe the bar will be raised. There are two ways to hedge against this outcome:

1. Continuous Improvement. Begin with a good starting point of game that works and then gradually inject your own style into it until it’s completely yours. If you’re using material that no one guy is using, and that is optimized for your personality, then you won’t get this shield that lair members are getting at the Reef (one must question why they flock there repeatedly in such large numbers).

2. Supreme Confidence. The only thing you can’t fake is supreme confidence, gained only through massive amounts of experience, failure, and most importantly, success. In ten years if every guy has a cocky vibe then the girls will select the men who they believe has the confidence to back it. It’s important to work on the words you are saying, but remember the point of those words are just to show you are a confident man. Once you get confidence, the words naturally come out of your mouth and match with the correct alpha body language. You’ll be able to read from a phone book but it won’t shake the attraction she has for you. I’m not exaggerating.

Things went back to normal after I left the hostel in Cordoba. Future hostels were full of beta males all too eager to please the girls and my D-grade lazy material would get girls staring and asking me what I was doing for dinner. The Earth realigned itself.

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I was sitting down on the subway car thinking of making a play on a Turkish girl to my left. I knew she was Turkish because she was speaking Turkish with her two friends before they cheek kissed her goodbye and made a loud exit like only Turks know how. But she had a Blackberry and a slight resemblance to my wonderful Turkish mother, so I decided to inspect my fingernails instead to see if they needed trimming.

At the next stop two guys and two girls came onto the train. They paired off as they sat and all seemed like just friends. I’m not an expert on body language but at 29 I think I know if two people are fucking or not. They held my attention, partly because I was done looking at my fingernails but also because of their exceptionally clear Spanish. Their minimal use of slang and clear enunciation told me they definitely were not from dirty Mexico or Central America. Maybe they were from Colombia, I thought.

This was the last midnight train, and they were tired. Judging by their backpacks it looked like they studied at some library followed with a trip to some Washington DC forest to blaze. The girls rested their heads on their respective guy. The first guy put his arm around his girl and just let it hang there. They both closed their eyes. Go to sleep.

The second girl had her eyes closed on the second guy’s chest as well, but his eyes were opened. He was looking at the top of her head and stroking her hair, slowly and deliberately like she was a gentle flower with fine petals that easily come off. He would not take his eyes off her head. Just staring at her black hair covered skull. He did this for the next twenty minutes, stroking and touching and looking while she did not respond in any way. If I had to take a guess as to what he was thinking, it would be “If she ever leaves me I’m going to kill her and her family.” It was one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen in my life, second only to an internet video I was tricked into watching of a grown man having sex with a horse. Actually I wasn’t tricked, I was curious, like any normal, well-balanced human being would be when presented with the opportunity to watch such an intriguing perversion of nature.

Physical affection is important in a healthy relationship, but it’s not natural to pet an unconscious girl who isn’t aware of your petting. The only exception is if the girl is in a coma and you are trying to bring her back to life. Creepy guys tend to be beta males, living absurd fantasies in their head because they can’t do it in real life until one day it comes out in a subway car and is noticed by an astute observer taking mental notes because he refuses to buy an iPod. It just didn’t add up to me that this beta male was in the position to stroke the head of a beautiful girl that I would personally get with in a heartbeat. It went against everything I have learned and experienced in the past seven years. I’ll get over it, I thought—this is just the exception and I shouldn’t change my world view just for this haunting display of affection.

Turns out that that won’t even be necessary.

When they all got up at their stop a surprise switch occurred. The girls held hands of the opposite guy as they walked off the train. Are they all just fuck buddies who swap partners like in an obese swingers farm or are they all just childhood friends? I don’t have to change shit. They’re just friends.