Time to change up...

Four more months of real, grownup, married life later, and I am rethinking what I do with this blog. I started this when I was lonely and dating and looking for something, and now I've found it and the world is very different. Maybe I'm living a journey not too different from Neil Strauss, who went from The Game to Emergency - learning how to pick up women, then learning how to protect himself and his family in case of the world collapsing. Well I've been around the world and seen that it's collapsing. Collapse is nothing new to me. But other things are. Like, responsibility. Not being able to risk my life so casually. Thinking about saving money and resources.

But it occurs to me that these, like my previous concerns about pickup and loneliness, addiction and nostalgia, are also concerns people have. Along with my abiding interest in pop culture and novels. Not to mention that there is still just as much need for a sharp tongue now as ever, in my life.

So, perhaps there is still a place for this blog.

Having said that, my blogroll is hopelessly out of date, so I think I am going to change it up. Goodbye Suzette, I loved you. Bad Man, you emailed me back when I was close to rock bottom, and now you're gone from the web. Naked Loft Party, you guys left too. Tim Ferriss, I will continue to read everything you write (and thanks for 4HB, I am using your protocols to help recover from both back and ankle injuries), but you certainly don't need any of the trivial traffic I would send your way! I do seem to be following you in life though. I am just now getting into cooking - me and Princess are becoming expert chefs. So, of course, I'll be getting 4HC... although for now, Jamie Oliver's doing a pretty awesome job.

Married life, trust...

Welcome back - more for myself.

So much happens in a year and a half.

I have been married to the Princess, almost a year now. I have got a modest bestseller and am transitioning to becoming a full-time author, transitioning from the humanitarian work that would be taking me away from Princess and my future children. Voice is long gone. Now a very distant work-colleague, literally oceans away. Music is a distant memory. Soulmate, a best friend. Princess is my world now, and I would trade it for nothing on earth.

From trying late to learn the skills of pickup, I am now in a totally different world. I am now trying to be a good husband. From trying to learn how to get and keep a girl's attention, my mind is now focused on how to manage constant demands for my attention and balance them against work, friends. It is amazing how things change. A few years ago I would have looked at Princess and strategized how I could get her to talk to me. How I would make myself interesting enough.

Now my life is characterized by her complete trust of me. Her life has been characterized by betrayal after betrayal, from family to early mentors on. She met me disillusioned. Thinking she couldn't trust anyone, knowing that you can do very little in this world if you really can't trust anyone, wanting desperately to trust me. And now she does. For every little thing, for every answer, for a role model, she looks to me. Her annoyance with me is always when she thinks I am not paying enough attention to her.

And I have trust in her, too. The idea that she might cheat on me strikes me as preposterous. And her trust in me is what makes me not want to cheat.

I have fantasies though. She has a best friend, who's almost as hot as her in a totally different way. Tall, athletic, big blond curly hair, very submissive. I imagine what a threesome would be like. We could all live together, maybe. I imagine showering with the best friend while Princess is doing her work in the next room, we all lay down together at night, I come home to find them in bed together laughing. I could teach the best friend a lot, the way I've taught Princess.

But when my temptations and fantasies run away from me, I imagine how it would shatter her world and it's almost like a protection from my own selfishness. She trusts me. I fear screwing it up. But her trust in me makes me want to live up to it. I think maybe this is how people grow. We grow because others believe we are better than we are. She thinks of me as her little god, and now I have to earn that.

I could learn to like this whole sex thing

Toronto is record hot for this time of year. Princess stays with me to escape her non-air conditioned apartment. We're legit now: she's met the parents and the Soulmate and all that. We're still deciding whether we'll face her parents head on or escape from them.

Princess is a strange combination of shyness and awareness of the fact that she looks like a supermodel. When I tell her I like Christina Hendricks better than Zhang Ziyi, who she resembles, she turns to ice - she thinks I'm saying I like curvy girls better than her ectomorphic beauty. Not the case at all. But a strange kind of proof that whatever her insecurities (she also thinks she's flat chested) she's also well aware of what she does to men. To me.

She's a virgin, but as I take her clothes off and kiss and hold her, she has this worldliness and acts like none of this is any surprise to her. It takes a few times to learn her but I am a good student and I learn how to please her, and she turns me on like no one ever has. I never thought I'd say that since Music. I never thought I would find anyone to equal her, but Princess excites me more. Princess makes me feel more certain, more aligned, more true.

So, at 5am, for the second time in the night, we make love. She doesn't like fingers. She takes a long time to come from my tongue on her, and she does so in a very low key way - a quiet little shudder, not the rapid breathing and rhythmic moving and sometimes screaming I'd gotten used to - though as she gets past her shyness and realizes what turns me on, she's getting a little louder. I'm on top of her, and behind her, and then she's on top. I slide down: "What are you --" and she moans as I put my mouth on her, her above me on her hands and knees. She comes like that and I go back behind her and take her again. "Mmmm... that feels good."

I whisper in her ear the whole time, that I love her, how beautiful she is. She just moans. "I love you too," she whispers. She's a little obsessed with cleanliness and thinks her body is dirty. I explain to her that I'm not attracted to the way her soap smells, which is very nice, but to the way she smells. After I've gone down on her she won't kiss me. But now she's sweaty and hot and a beautiful mess. "Can I come, or do you want to do it longer?" "Just come," she says. I do. I take the condom off, wrap it in a tissue, and collapse next to her.

"I like this whole sex thing," she says, smiling.

"Well, if you ever want it, you know who to call."

"Thanks," she says, rolling her eyes.

I miss no one, I think of no one else, now. I can feel Voice's absence and it's a very good thing. I don't feel uncertain about myself. I don't walk on eggshells. I don't fear the future. I don't fear a future of never knowing if she's with me. I trust the Princess when I open my mail in her presence or get a call in her presence, when either of those things with Voice would lead to a fight with her interrogating me about who was calling and why. I trust the Princess when she gets texts or calls in my presence and don't wonder if they're another secret lover like me. The amount of energy that went into holding my sanity (barely) in that situation - I am only realizing how much energy it was now that I am slowly getting it back. I am going to marry this girl. I have never felt so ready or so sure. I already belong to her.

Secret relationship, secret breakup

I'm babysitting and watching 'Dreamgirls', falling in love with Beyonce again. Eddie Murphy's character is about to go on stage. His girlfriend, played by Anika Noni Rose, gives him a kiss for each year that's gone by with her as a mistress and him still married and promising to leave his wife. 8 kisses. I would have given 4.

An interrupted 4. A 4 with several periods, including one a year long, where I saw a lot of other women. But in those years, even when we weren't talking, we both knew that we loved each other. We both knew that we were friends.

So this time, when I tell her I've fallen for someone else, and she goes in for hostility and defamation, it's a surprise. It's painful. A surprise for her, since every time I left over the past four years, it was not real. And this time it is.

"I can't wrap my head around it," I tell Roommate. "We're supposed to be enemies now? After everything?"

He shrugs.

I'm the kind of guy that would want to be able to get a coffee with her, or a dinner, and hear about her latest relationship adventures. I don't put borders around relationships. I've suffered for my inability to do so, certainly with her, probably in general. But I can't do it any other way. So the realization that my dream of friendship isn't going to happen is slow, and painful.

And I miss her. I watch videos of her songs. I check her twitter site, which she's been using to send coded messages of hostility my way. She tells our friends to tell me she's over it and doesn't care, now she sees I'm really pathetic.

The scandal protects me. She can't defame too much without revealing her dirty secret - me. So we both have to suffer in silence while we pretend indifference.

She tells me to never email or call or contact her again. She recently bought me an elaborate gift from five different stores in the mall. She tells me she wasted money she didn't have on it in our last conversation.

I go to each store, return each gift (the DVDs, the electronics, the clothes...), get a receipt, create an itemized ledger for the full amount, get cash out of the bank machine, bundle the receipts and ledger into an envelope, and leave it for her with the last of her stuff that I had. Money you didn't have, I write. You have it now. Thanks for the tweets, I don't write. That would be to tell her that it affected me.

Four years of friendship, four more of love, and it really comes to this? Could I not have hoped for better? Or should I, as everyone warned me, have known all along that this was all it was ever going to come to, because this was all it was? My body can't believe it. But my body came to fear her rejection and her contempt and her lies more than it longed for her. I really did hope for better.

The door's open, just a crack...

She's my friend's girl. They're off and on. Off, right now. She's in town for a few days. She stays with me, it's only sensible. Roommate is not at home. When we hang out in public she leans against me subtly. She hugs me for really long when we greet.

I set her up on the couch. Turn the heat up. Go to my room. Close the door tightly. Then I open it again.

I put my head to the pillow. 45 minutes later she walks in and crawls into my bed. "I'm wide awake," she says. "Is this okay?" She snuggles up to me and strokes my head and pulls my hair. "Yeah," I say. Our heads touch, and we are kissing. She likes to do it on top, holding me down, moving at her own rhythm. I smile and try to stay focused. I'm thinking about someone else. Voice flashes into my mind. Voice crying when I tell her I'm leaving. For real this time. Not like the last three times. So many betrayals.

In the morning I take her to the airport. We talk about her rocky relationship with my friend like we hadn't been making love two hours before. Or maybe like we had, and it makes no difference. This one will always be a secret. It all felt inevitable. But now it's done and it feels wrong.

Free yourself from addiction and win

After hearing from several independent and hard-core smokers of success quitting using Allen Carr's "Easyway" I got the book, read it, and passed it on - to Soulmate and the Princess, and a few others.

I woke up with Princess yesterday morning, watched her put on makeup. "Oh no," she says, "I have the smoky eye look." She's a jeans kinda girl, not the tights and boots that are spinning my head about since the weather got cold. But she has this waterfall of brown hair and she pulls her knees up on the chair when she talks to you. She sounds a little whiny when she talks but in a cute way, like Hayley McFarland (the Tim Roth character's daughter in Lie to Me). Too young for me. Not, evidently.

Watching her react to the easyway got me thinking a lot about addictions. Consider this. If you add up everyone who's addicted to smoking, porn, drinking, coke, heroin, eating, gambling, sex, coffee... you would get almost everybody. My own addiction experiences are porn and, now that porn is clearing up, I am realizing how much of a coffee problem I have. Having these compulsions you can't control has a few effects, all of which Allen Carr talks about in his Easy Way to Stop Smoking book. It makes you a fugitive. You doubt your strength. You hide from yourself and others. You are perpetually ashamed.

The shame thing is especially interesting if you're trying to have success with women. I mentioned this in a previous blog. Confidence is attractive. So is health. Nothing saps these things like addictions do. I can feel it happening in me already. If you can face a woman with absolutely nothing to hide, you can give off an impression of total congruence and sincerity. If on the other hand, you have these drives you can't control and are ashamed of, that is going to show up somehow in your body language, somewhere, and it will undermine everything else that you are trying to do when you want to attract someone. What's more, the freedom you have and the strength that you have is itself attractive. It is something that almost everyone wants. It's a little bit intimidating, actually, to people who have everyday addictions (especially to things like smoking or coffee) or hidden ones (like to porn or gambling or hard drugs).

Today's my second day off of coffee and hoo-wee have I got a headache. I walk through the PATH underground mall on my way to work and it feels like every Tim Horton's, Starbucks, and Second Cup is singing to me... "Come, Verbal. Comfort is here."

But I walk on, and take my comfort from the original pickup song. Long before there was a pua community there was "Bust a Move" by Young MC: "On the beach you're strollin', real high rollin' everything you have is yours and not stolen. A girl walks up with something to prove..."

When you're free of addiction, everything you have is yours and not stolen.

God is in the rain

Tonight I'm feeling a little like V for Vendetta and Evey rolled into one. I'm torturing myself... by re-reading and typing out all the letters that Soulmate wrote to me, like 20 years ago. The beauty in those letters, the beauty in us, and actually the wisdom too, is something I lost when I cheated on her and never regained. Isn't that strange? I was never stronger or more balanced, better able to love or be loved, than I was when I was 17. That can't be true and yet it feels and looks that way from here.

The memories are so intense, the encounter with this little girl's soul and my own, that it breaks my heart. And it is helping me somehow. There is a place that is way beyond game and way beyond rejection, a place of love and connection and people reaching out for one another and being true to themselves and each other and strong enough to face what comes and putting the other before the self. And I touch that place when I read those letters, I lived in that place, even though I was also in the school musical and the track team and lived a full-on high school suburban drama too. Now the rest of my life is so much more real and I have seen so much more suffering and tried to do so much in the world, but that wisdom and love feels like it's eluded me for so long. Why?

It all makes me want to reach out to my Soulmate but she's not the same person that wrote these letters any more than I'm the same person who got them and wrote back. And wisdom isn't in trying to relive those times. I'm blogging now instead of trying to write to someone or call someone because I am trying to do as V told Evey, don't run away from it. I have to go back to the letters now.