What should the measure of success be for players? Number of notches? Quality of notches? Quantity / quality of sex?

The better my game, the less new notches I get. When you have sex with a growing number of girls, your rolodex gets large. Do I call the girl who is fun and knows how to do the anal move on me that I discovered in Brazil, or do I roll the dice in the field?

There is a large time / money / energy cost to new notches, and many times they are a total bust. I say build a pleasant stable and let that ride until the girls get tired of your shit. Or vice versa. Even lions don’t hunt all the time.

Chasing a girl with a boyfriend used to be such an awesome challenge for me. I loved how I was penetrating something that I should not be able to. I pursued girls who had a boyfriend more than single ones, but I was young and immature then and don’t really do that anymore. I have morals now.

There are girls with boyfriends you should chase, and those that you should not, such as girls who just got engaged or married. I don’t even need to tell you this because chances are she won’t even talk to you. She is still on cloud nine with commitment bliss and wouldn’t consider cheating.

On the flip side are girls who are having trouble with their boyfriends. It’s possible you won’t need a strategy to deal with these girls because you may not even find out about the boyfriend until after you kissed, fingered, or banged her. With them all you need to do is stay aggressive and keep the sexual tension tight. The sex should happen unless something big changes in the relationship.

Then you have the murky middle, where she is not quite unhappy with the relationship but not happy either. Girls are different so one who is slightly unhappy might not cheat but one who is slightly happy might. How do you know if she is worth pursuing or not? Two key signs:

1. Length of time until the boyfriend drop. The longer amount of time until she mentions the boyfriend the better it is for you. If a girl is in a happy relationship, the boyfriend will be constantly popping in her mind like in a game of Duck Hunt. She will feel guilty talking with a charming, teaseful guy and will have to drop at some point that her boyfriend is an amazing guy who rocks her world. But if takes 15, 30, even 60 minutes for this to come up, consider her breakable. Bonus if she doesn’t tell you at all and you learn through a third party.

2. Her level of engagement. It’s possible she can have a boyfriend but still want to talk to other guys in the bar to keep things “exciting” at home. Maybe she wants to feel alive or still attractive. How can you separate her from a girl who is more open to cheating? The answer is how much she engages you, by doing things like keeping the conversation going, touching you (very very big), and seeking you out after a break in the conversation, either verbally or through eye contact. If you talk to her for ten minutes and she doesn’t even ask you for your name and things feel like a one-sided interview, move on.

If it takes forever for the boyfriend drop to come and she’s still sticking around you, then do what you normally do and at the minimum try for the kiss. Two things happen if you get your face close to her to feel for the kiss: either she turns away at the very last second or she says, “I can’t… I have a boyfriend.” You respond: “Oh that’s fine with me.” AGREE, AGREE, AGREE. Do not allow her to come up with objections in her mind. Then you try again in a few minutes.

Her: “I can’t do anything.” You: “We’re not! I’m just hanging out.” Keep going, keep pushing. If she doesn’t walk away from you and get out of a situation where she might cheat, she wants to cheat. So you’re just doing what she wants you to do… subconsciously anyway.

There’s a myth going around that women are stronger than men, but I think they’re just as weak as us. If she puts herself in a position to break, she will.

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Six weeks ago I wasn’t completely honest when I gave reasons for why my trip to South America ran short. Something happened.

A couple months into the trip it became very obvious that I wasn’t going to meet a “serious” girl. The language barrier and my one-city-every-four-days routine made it difficult to happen. There would often be physical attraction, but nothing that had enough substance to last. I thought that would change in Cordoba where the girls are extremely beautiful, but their attitude was quite different than what I have become accustomed to. Even there, nothing got past the physical.

By the time I got to Rio de Janeiro, I gave up any idea of meeting a girl that I would consider dating long-term. I hung out with some fun Australian guys I first met in Cordoba and we did our thing of going out and hitting on the locals. We’d drink and not really care besides getting some cheap thrills. But on my seventh day there, I met someone.

The only reason I approached her was because I swear she gave me a look. We talked and within just a few minutes she told me she liked me. Things moved fast—and not just physically. Next thing I know I’m checking out of my hostel to stay with her. We’d cook together, she’d show me around the city, and we’d come back into her studio apartment and have intimacy. During that time I wondered why it was so much harder to do this back home.

I had to do some serious thinking. If the end game is meeting a girl you consider a life partner—someone that you can maybe even love—then I made it. I’m there. Finally, after approaching a million girls, I’m satisfied. And I doubt it’s a coincidence that she is one the most beautiful girls I’ve ever been with. She didn’t want to come to the United States (I don’t blame her), so I had to make a decision.

I’m a firm believer in taking risks and adapting to whatever situation you put yourself in. I do believe she is worth it, more than any other girl I met. So we decided to make a go of this. I came back to the States to tie up some loose ends and spend time with my family and friends, and I return back to Rio exactly one month from today. I’m tired of looking at just a photograph of her taped to my bedside. I’ll be back to visit around Christmas.

The blog will continue of course, and maybe even get better as I can write more about how to have a fulfilling relationship. This just feels right.

A common question girls asks me is how to get a man they are dating to commit. When it comes to dating or relationships, this question is much harder than helping guys get laid. Casual sex is more like trying to find a funny t-shirt while commitment is shopping for a house. But I have two suggestions for girls:

1. Read The Art of Seduction. This is not a self-improvement book for those of you that freak out by that genre, but the stories and strategy in here is guaranteed to give you some ideas you can use. It shows you through historical examples how men (and women) have turned into mush with concepts that more or less still work today. Plus it’s just a great book. For example, a chapter most girls I meet need to learn is Master The Art Of Insinuation:

The way insinuation works is simple: disguised in a banal remark or encounter, a hint is dropped. It is about some emotional issue—a possible pleasure not yet attained, a lack of excitement in a person’s life. The hint registers in the back of the target’s mind, a subtle stab at his or her insecurities; its source is quickly forgotten. It is too subtle to be memorable at the time, and later, when it takes root and grows, it seems to have emerged naturally from the target’s own mind, as if it was there all along. Insinuation lets you bypass people’s natural resistance, for they seem to be listening only to what has originated in themselves. It is a language on its own, communicating directly with the unconscious. No seducer, no persuader, can hope to succeed without mastering the language and art of insinuation.

The only time girls insinuate these days is when they want to complain about something you aren’t doing right.

2. Use jealousy. There is no emotion stronger than getting the feeling that a girl you like and have been breezy with is slipping through your grasp and about to be taken off the market. If that doesn’t cause the man to act fast, at least temporarily, then it’s time to accept that he will never be ready to commit with you.

Even though I know a girl is using jealousy, I can’t just tell my brain to shut down the uncomfortable feelings that drive me to her even more. It’s powerful, and deadly if used to your advantage. I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: if you are a guy with your eyes on a particular girl, letting her see you laugh with a girl prettier than her will do more to help your cause than any line or routine you can think of.

There is a sad article called Marry Him which has been floating around. I’ve beaten the topic to death here but there are a few sections I wanted to comment on.

And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.

Part of the problem is that when she does hit the panic stage she blames everyone but herself. It’s hopeless because these women will never make the changes necessary to get a husband. They don’t adapt.

My advice is this: Settle! That’s right. Don’t worry about passion or intense connection. Don’t nix a guy based on his annoying habit of yelling “Bravo!” in movie theaters. Overlook his halitosis or abysmal sense of aesthetics. Because if you want to have the infrastructure in place to have a family, settling is the way to go. Based on my observations, in fact, settling will probably make you happier in the long run, since many of those who marry with great expectations become more disillusioned with each passing year.

All girls have to do is be reasonable. They need to ask themselves if what they want deep in their hearts exists in the real world. If it does then is she bringing enough to the table?

It sounds obvious now, but I didn’t fully appreciate back then that what makes for a good marriage isn’t necessarily what makes for a good romantic relationship. Once you’re married, it’s not about whom you want to go on vacation with; it’s about whom you want to run a household with. Marriage isn’t a passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane, and often boring nonprofit business.

This is obvious to most guys. We have this expression called “marriage material” to describe girls who take care of us and would run a good household. We would not consider marrying the girl who allows us to videotape sex so we can show all our friends.

So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?

Notice the extreme selfishness: who cares about the child having a good daddy as long as you can be with it? With all we know about the disadvantages of growing up in a single family household, I’m surprised more people are not calling these single mothers for the harm they are doing on kids who I’m sure would prefer to have a father.

What I and many women who hold out for true love forget is that we won’t always have the same appeal that we may have had in our 20s and early 30s. Having turned 40, I now have wrinkles, bags under my eyes, and hair in places I didn’t know hair could grow on women.

Gross, but don’t forget the kid from an anonymous man.

This article got me thinking to why is there demand for dating or marriage advice. Why does this article (and this blog) even need to be written? I think part of the answer is that there is no tradition or culture to fall back on in meeting people. In this country our parents did not give us sound advice on how to meet the opposite sex and how to find a long-term mate, so a Mystery comes along or The Rules girls write a book (”breathe slowly”!!!) and everyone jumps on because no one knows what the fuck they are doing. Something retarded like speed dating or “lock and key” parties arrive in e-mail boxes and everyone tries it because they have no idea how to meet someone. And a 40-year-old woman who was inseminated with sperm and who failed in finding just one decent man is writing an article in a major publication on how to get married. That would be like me writing about how to keep your long-term girlfriend happy.

If knowledge was passed from generation to generation then you’d have a lot of people growing up with sound beliefs on how to deal with the opposite sex, but that’s not what we have here anymore. Instead we’re hypersexualized and clueless.

Everyone has a laundry list of qualities they want in the opposite sex. This is especially true for women, whose ideal type often crosses into the fantasy realm. If you break down these lists down into component parts, almost everything can fit into three categories: personality, appearance, and sexuality.

Personality is connection and rapport. Can you spend time with her outside the bedroom? Do you not wish she would stop talking?

With appearance, is she easy on the eyes? Can I take her out in public without constantly thinking I can do better?

Sexuality is chemistry, both inside the bedroom and out. Can I not keep my hands off her? Can she take what I have to give her? Does she seem conscious when I am giving it to her?

Two of these categories need to be satisfied to casually date someone. Usually it’s appearance and something else, because these days we are meeting people in bars and clubs instead of being set up on blind dates by our parents. If brighter lighting or sober eyes take away the appearance, the something else won’t be good enough to continue seeing the person ever again. Relationships where two categories are met usually last a few dates until things stall out.

If the third category is satisfied, she is officially compatible with you. The usual result is you will still be in touch with her one year down the road, whether you are dating or not. A common reason a relationship wouldn’t work in this case is bad timing.

You need to prioritize your desired qualities. This is my ranking:

1. Appearance
2. Personality
3. Sexuality

Sexuality is third because most of the time I’m spending with a girl will be talking to her and not banging.

What I see with girls is they write off men who don’t possess all the qualities they want, and keep in mind their lists are twenty times as long as a guy’s. Instead of having a prioritized list, everything for them is weighted equally, which produces the spinster phenomenon we are all too familiar with. As long as a girl is very strong in your two most important categories, it may be worth it if you can work on the third. I’m not saying to settle, but I am saying be realistic and open to someone who is satisfying your most important needs. Because you will not find someone who completely satisfies them all.

My Dad has a special dining room chair that only he can sit in. The regular chairs are plain, old, and without ass cushioning, but my Dad has a fancy chair with a large cushion and a carved design on the back. It’s a few inches higher than all the other dining room chairs. His wife (my stepmom) bought it for his birthday.

When my Dad comes home from work around 5PM or so, the house is clean and a pot of tea is ready for him. He drinks his tea and plays with the kids or reads the paper while my stepmom cooks dinner. She cooks dinner at least five nights a week, and during those nights my Dad doesn’t enter the kitchen except to get a class of water. He doesn’t do any cleaning either, and even if he wanted to there is nothing to do by the time he gets home. Everything she does is to make his life as comfortable and relaxing as possible, setting up a pleasant environment for him to continue providing for her and the kids.

The concept of “me time” is foreign to her; it’s family time twenty-four hours a day. It’s hard even for me to imagine her asking my Dad to watch the kids while she goes out with friends. It doesn’t happen and I don’t think it ever will. If she wants to go out, the kids are going with her.

When I cook my own meals, my stepmom likes to clean up after me as I’m still cooking. I’ve had to fight with her many times to not do my dishes, but she does it anyway. And even if I clean up my own dishes, she thanks me. “Back in Iran, the man doesn’t do any cleaning,” she says to me. She was taught this from a young age. American public schools have taught me to clean up after myself so it feels weird that someone else wants to clean up my mess instead. Well it did feel weird but I’m quickly getting used to the Iranian way of doing things.

I know what you are wondering. “Is she is happy?” I can tell you with very high confidence that she is extremely happy. For a woman who grew up in a small Iranian town, coming to America, marrying a stable provider, and having two healthy children is like hitting the jackpot. I’m sure that there are women here who hit the American jackpot of marrying filthy rich that are much more unsatisfied than my stepmom. Living in a townhouse and driving a four-year-old Toyota to Ikea is the pinnacle of life to her. Imagine that.

In this country there are 17-year-olds whose parents have given them more material wealth than some of us will ever get to see. They have a “family” credit card and live in an upper middle-class McMansion that they travel from in a new car they received for their sweet sixteen birthday. When you have more than 99.5% of what other human beings have before you even start work, your view of life becomes distorted. In creeps entitlement and poor work ethic that affects your consumer habits (nothing is truly valued), how you view fun and pleasure (it can be bought), and how you approach human relationships (people are disposable).

My Dad has been hinting that he wants to return to Iran, but my stepmom keeps telling me how she doesn’t want to go back because she loves life here. Happiness is relative, perspective, and expectation—thinking too much is detrimental to happiness. Besides, you’ll just hurt your head (existential depression is considered a medical condition). I doubt my stepmom wonders about those bigger questions of life. Are the kids fed? Is the house clean? Is the spouse happy? Is there food and shelter? Then life is great. But for a lot of my peers and countrymen, that simply is nowhere close to being enough.

It was impossible for me to resist an article titled Why I Left My Beta Husband. It’s about a woman who got fed up with her stay-at-home life partner.

I stayed home with our daughter for six months after she was born while Mark continued, yes, looking for a job. In 18 months, he got just two calls. Meanwhile, I was being pursued by headhunters. Eventually, I took an editing job at a health magazine.

A man’s role changes with time. When you’re just dating it’s about satisfying a woman sexually and providing her with nice company that keeps the good bedroom times rolling. In a relationship it moves to protection and comfort and then in a marriage with children it’s about being an able provider. Having an interesting and witty personality will not cut it when your kids are hungry and need new clothes, which is why you don’t have kids unless you are prepared to work until death.

The truth is, I wasn’t attracted to [Mark] anymore. It wasn’t that he’d changed—he still had the same floppy brown hair, bright green eyes, and long freckled limbs that had literally made me quiver when I first met him. But in my head, I’d neutralized him as a sexual being. I wanted to be overwhelmed by the sheer power of his masculinity in the bedroom, but I wasn’t. Because I felt like the man in our relationship.

So she wised up, dumped Mark, and found her alpha stud, right? Of course not. You can never listen to a woman’s words because women have no idea what they want. This one simply went and found a Mark-clone who also likes poetry.

So nobody was more surprised than I was when I went ahead and fell for another stay-at-home dad.

Here’s the difference, though: Jason knows what he wants—and it’s not a corner office. He wants to have his afternoons free to hit the park with my daughter or paint or translate the writings of Pablo Neruda. There’s nothing thwarted or self-pitying about him. When we’re cooking dinner together on Friday nights in a kitchen fragrant with curry, or trying to drink coffee in bed on Sunday mornings while my daughter dances around us, I’m so attracted to him that it’s all I can do not to rip his clothes off then and there.

So Jason is much better because he knows he wants to be a bum. Hey I guess that gives me hope.

After sex, the power shifts to me. Vagina strength is highest before sex and declines to almost zero afterwards, assuming the girl is with a man who has options. I relax my game after sex not only because the power shift enables me to, but because if we are going to continue seeing each other the relationship has to be built on a foundation where we act natural and closer to our real selves. I know that a relationship built on two people playing hard to get will not last for more than a few dates, so I put less focus on planning alcohol dates with sex being the end goal and try for dates where we have to talk more under sober conditions (e.g. ice cream, bookstore)—more of just hanging out with each other’s company. But this is where it starts to fall apart because a lot of girls don’t know how to act when the main chase ends. They know their power has decreased so they overcompensate to keep your attention when they already had it in the first place.

I called a girl two days after I had first-time sex with her and she answered the phone. We talked for several minutes and then I suggested we do something in a few days. Her response: “Maybe.”

That’s in line with “That can be arranged,” an unnatural and tried answer, especially to a man whose hand you brought up to your neck for semi-aggressive choking. If you don’t want to hang out with me then fine, but don’t pick up the phone and try some move you just read in a book by a “relationship expert.” Don’t tell me the bookstore is boring. Don’t respond to my voicemail with a text message. Don’t suggest a specific restaurant unless you are treating. Don’t start talking about your past relationship failures. Don’t be surprised when I decide to move on.

Assuming you are cute (which is why I talked to you) and good in bed (which is why I called you again), you don’t have to put on a front to keep me interested. After sex, a girl’s game should transition from communication and logistical games to teasing and seduction games, where she tries to heighten a man’s physical arousal during the time they are together. She should send him to his buddy saying, “Dude, this girl drives me crazy. For some reason I can’t stop thinking about her.”

Girls need to increase sexual tension not by withholding attention (an okay strategy before sex) but by giving good attention that takes time and work to master. A lot of girls, unfortunately, have no desire to improve their game beyond techniques they learned in high school. To them, attention withholding is game. But once a man penetrates vagina, chances are he won’t be turned on by the extra time it takes you to return a telephone call.

On the surface, it looks like sex ruins things—the dynamic changes, the energy dissipates, and the tension disappears. Sometimes the relationship lasts, but most of the time, it doesn’t.

Before sex, it’s all about showing up on time and smelling nice. The sexual tension does the rest. It helps you idealize your partner to keep you motivated and on task. I can’t be the only guy to think I’m falling in love with a girl only to lose all interest after I catch my breath. While this tension will never be as high as the moment before that first penetration, it can be maintained at a healthy level with spontaneity, unpredictability, and creativity—qualities that only come as a result of effort.

Effort. I think this culture used to be about putting in effort and hard-work back when our parents were coming up, but it’s been replaced with expectation. All of us are trained to expect things. We expect to afford a nice car and house for going to college. We expect to be entertained every day . We expect the dead person to be scraped off the road in a timely manner so that we can make yoga class. The problem with expectation is that it leads to entitlement, and entitlement leads to a lack of effort. If both of you are not putting in more effort after sex, things will fade out.

The big issue with out generation is not with getting laid (we’re in a golden era for that), but with what we believe a relationship should be. He believes beauty queens should fall from the sky if he is earning six figures and she believes Prince Charming and Funny and Ambitious should sweep her into a McMansion because she is well-read and has pretty nails. “I put in this work to get where I am, so I am entitled to an amazing partner for life. I shouldn’t have to do more.” It doesn’t work like that. Guys: you are going to have to bring more to the table than flashing your extra glossy business card and offering to take girls to expensive dinners. Girls: it’s going to take more than just looking pretty and sending text messages.

People want the best without putting in work, without sacrificing, without caring. We expect to get more than we are putting in, but ask anyone in a happy marriage how it’s really done and they will tell you it’s all about the effort. You have to care and you have to try, every single day. Good luck finding someone here under the age of 30 who understands that concept. Instead of working towards real change to increase their value, most twenty-somethings instead whine about how life isn’t fair and how bad their luck is, as if there is a concerted effort by the overlords of our universe to keep them single and unhappy. You are responsible for your romantic happiness, and no one else. If there is a problem then get off your ass and do something about it, no matter how many years it takes to solve.

But even if you are willing to put in that effort, there is no guarantee you will get back it in return. The expectation mindset is so perverse and widespread in this country that you will quickly get frustrated at the inability of your romantic interests to put in an amount of work you think is necessary for something to last. It looks like we’ve gotten to the point where modern dating is about experiencing a lot of disappointment until you finally run into someone who gives a damn and shows it.