Etherial Cat

Value is extremely subjective though. Not everyone value the same things. I see that usually the men on this forum do not assign value to the same things as the women do, so the word "value" becomes an obstacle to a mutual understanding. This concept is a shape shifter and that's also a key element to keep in mind. More than only objective elements, I value things such as compatibility, common interests, intimacy, easiness, aligned vision, etc.. Also, I don't value a relationship with a man I'd be worried to lock "down". Let alone one that would make me feel like I need to bend over and crush my integrity to keep him. A rule that I have is that I want a man to be excited about me in the same way as I am excited about him. And I'd recommend everyone to have the same standard because it's important for the health of a relationship to have two parts that are feeling equally important, to avoid neediness and enmeshment.

??? You've nailed that analogy. McDonalds would also make a wonderful family name for Chad. Chad McDonalds. He lacked a surname and this one would fit him just perfect.

I feel like you didn't get what I said. Love is not selfless. Love is loving oneself and Oneself with a capital O at the same time. You cannot love in a total selfless way because your human form is limited by essence. It has prerequisites to maintain itself alive and in good health (physically, mentally etc). Self-love and self-respect are not concepts of a wounded ego. Self-love and self-respect is taking care of who you are and that doesn't mean it is taking care of your ego. Enlighten being all still have human needs. And fulfilling these needs do not make them selfish but self-loving. There is nothing wrong with needs as long as you do not operate from a place of greed and delusion. Eckhart Tolle, Ramana Maharshi or the Buddha operate/ed from SELF-LOVE and not from SELFISHNESS. There is two mode of operations. The way toward devilry or the way toward consciousness and universal love. When you are attracted towards selfishness, what you do is that you are acting against your holistic best interest and needs for the sake of a mental illusion which is the ego.

Yes, but that's being attracted to people who are driven by Self-Love. An unattractive morbidly obese guy with smelly feet, cumulating all the unattractive traits you have mentioned is very likely someone who is having a lot of emotional and self-esteem issues. Very "poor self-love", most likely. Humans are attracted to healthy behavior. And while Self-Love is attractive, devilish selfishness is repulsive. Two selfish asses are also not a match. What we like as human is to love people who are lovable and being lovable ourself. And of course, we want to love ourself as well. Putting yourself in danger or in financially trouble is not love. Forcing yourself to like someone who is not loving itself is not love either.

The type of selfishness being described here by Preety is not an egoic driven selfishness but a self-love driven one. Body integrity is self-respect. If both gender acts towards an egoic selfishness, they drift apart. If both gender acts towards Self-Love, they converge. People tend to confond these two facets of "selfishness". One leads to devilry and is unconscious, the other to harmony and is conscious.

Depends what is hiding behind the concept of selfishness maybe? Selfishness in the traditional lingo is the fulfillment of an ego-made sense of self's agenda without caring for your meta, holistic Self which is all what is. And this is "bad". But selfishness as a misnomer for Self-Love and giving yourself what you need and can enjoy while being still loving to "others" is totally fine and even optimum. This is the real "selfishness"... being so selfish that you give to all fragment of Yourself what it needs and deserve, beyond the little ego .

I'm gonna stop it here.

Intimacy always start with yourself. And you can anyway only understand in other what is part of your experience. But if you are going to engage in a relationship with another human, having intimacy with them is mandatory. The quality of your relationship with them depends on it. Communication, agenda, the understanding of feelings and intellectual position, going through the challenges and solving the problems that can arise all depends on intimacy.

Intimacy is like an intellectual/emotional penetration. The closer you get to where someone "is" at currently and understand him/her, the more intimacy you have. Most people do not see one another. The more you miss on who the person is, the more you are dealing with an idea of the person instead of seeing them for who they are. You can be in a room with someone, or have sex with it and not actually being present with the person. You actually miss out on all its internal life, beyond the body. Making of this a joke or something secondary is sad. Everyone should want intimacy.

Yeah... but on a longer timeframe than the current hookup culture.

Hmm... It's like, you interact with a person and follow the flow without having necessary special expectations about what this is, at first. Usually, you don't decide ahead either whether you are going to be friend with someone or not. There is a lot of detachment on the outcome at this stage. Then the thing takes off because there are some natural compatibility and there are cues given on both side that something is building up on the attraction level. For female, it is particularly reassuring because at this stage you know that the guy isn't there only to dip his dick and really likes you and vice versa. Starting right away with sexual/romantic intent comes off as fishy, especially if a platonic relation is not offered. And if you are a woman, you might get worried that he's only interested in your because it happens that you are his type physically, which comes off as a bit shallow.

Notice that it is you and Lucas who have been talking about friendship. In your case, you've been talking about it twice in capital letter. Friendship is not the right word, the idea is basically that you start platonically when you get to know someone. And it takes a bit of time to decide whether or not you vibe. At this point, it is totally ok to do a first move. Friendship is not a dating strategy and I don't think anybody here has ever claimed that it was a good one. In fact, there has been a few threads about how it is a bad idea to befriend women in the hope of dating them. That's not what is being talked about here.

I'm not talking about trying to become friend with a girl with the purpose of perhaps dating her. What is being discussed here is the case when you have a day-to-day relationship with a girl in your vicinity until you realize you want to date her because "there is a vibe". Ideally, you'd have plenty of people with whom you build acquaintance relationship/ friendship around. That's before initiating a potential move toward more because attraction is building up on both side after getting to know to each other. Anyway- this advice was directed toward female. Not male. But it also works that way sometimes for men.

This works also from a masculine perspective, by the way ?. I'm not saying you can't go through other means, but mocking Emerald's advice like you did doesn't make sense to me. Also... On my side, no sex before I know who is the person getting inside of me. I'm totally grossed out by the idea of letting a stranger in my body. I think this should be a standard and I would probably screen out anyone who's getting easily in bed with people based on mere sexual attraction without a deeper underlying thing. I anyway already do it.

The advice is far from being off. Usually, the way this works is that you notice someone you know in your circle and your interactions turns to something deeper than the surface level thingy. You see that it clicks, that you share interests and your energy are compatible. Slowly the vibe changes from normal to ambiguous. What is great in that context is that you get to know the person outside the context of just seduction. Because seduction is involving the persona and has this inherent competitive approach where both party want to win over the other one by being on its best behavior. The issue is that you don't get to see who that person is for a while in that way. Through spotting someone and getting to know each other on a more friendly base, you get to bypass a lot of that parade which I find undesirable.

3 months is rather short. You might scare the dude . Do you think your want to move in might be linked to the difficult place you are at emotionally due to what's up with your mum? If so, you could ask him if you could stay over at his place for a few days/weeks and kinda test the water. I also think it's better to go slowly and this looks like a fair compromise. If I were you, I wouldn't be keen on moving in directly without seeing how you actually spending some time together for a while works.

Thank you!

Thank you. Yes I really think that recognizing that pick-up has the ability both to help you develop your skills and lure you towards unattractive behavior and misconception is key.

I think you are missing the point here. Of course women love the fact that men are trying to make themselves more attractive for girls. But pick-up is un umbrella word which includes a lot of practices that are ultimately counter-productive and unattractive. I'm all for maximize dating related development lines, but I'm going to pin point at where traditional pick up is off. And one of these place where it is off is when men see relationship is a zero sum game or a win-lose or a lose-win. Typically, reading our comments and thinking that our agenda is to prevent you from becoming more attractive is one of these misconception. What we want to do is to create win-win solutions and help men to become truly attractive. And not waste your time and energy operating from common pitfalls which are widespread in the pick-up communities. Another important point is to start listening to women instead of assuming by default that we are stupid and don't know what we like. Relationships without proper connection and discussion are doomed to be a train-wreck. Making yourself more attractive starts here with learning how to listen without thinking that we are here to take away your power.

San Pedro is a wonderful plant medicine for healing. Should be added to all advices regarding using substance for healing. So I'm adding this there as well.

Great list of principles. This match my experience and puts it to words brilliantly.

It's an interesting thread for sure. Ultimately, I want to ask, what is pick-up? I think there was a few posts which were extremely interesting asking "how pick-up overlaps with personal development"? And this is spot on in my opinion. Is pick-up "the development line" of masculine dating self-help? Or is it something else overlapping with it? The way I see it is that pick-up reminds me of the relation alchemy versus real chemistry. It warrants some results, but it doesn't know exactly why. And a lot of it's theory appear to me as deadly wrong on a day-to-day basis when I read men talk about male/female attraction. Pick-up surely overlaps with what creates female attraction, but you don't need to know pick-up to be attractive. And that's because it is basically a collection of great practices observed in those who have a high degree of development in the areas tied to human desirability. And then what it tries to do is to generalize it, so men can emulate it and create results for themselves thanks to these tricks. But it's really also intertwined with a lot of unnecessary additions derived by masculine biases and projections. And this creates a lot of misconception about female desire for men. Especially because the results are also datas collected within a special social cultural context, at a certain point in time, through peculiar collective traumas etc. What bugs me a lot about this forum and the fact that a lot of time women in here a told that "you shouldn't ask women what they find attractive" is that it prevents women from correcting these misconception and more importantly it is a a self-deception mechanism from men to ignore the problems coming from pick-up. And I'm not going to sugar-coat it, but I think that the reason why they do it is because obviously because seduction in general is a nest for devilry. Which include their own way of using other human for self-gratification, consciously or unconsciously and they don't want to be confronted about it. Seduction is all about luring an object of desire your way as opposed as genuinely caring about an individual's welfare as well (which is love) and pick-up is generally used as the ultimate seduction tool towards getting the hottest girl your way. In Christianity, the devil notoriously lure humans by giving them what they think they want, not caring about the truthfulness and righteousness of it on a longer cause and effect frame. God on the other hand, cares about the ecology and welfare of everyone. And I think it makes up for a great parallel on why pick-up comes up as unconscious and bugging because in 95% of the case, the knowledge gathered from it is used as a selfish seduction tool to extract from woman what a man wants from them. And particularly with pick-up culture, there is a clear emphasis on chasing vagina and treating women as objects towards a mean (sex) instead of focusing on finding a human being that correspond your real needs holistically. In that way, pick-up (as an umbrella term) can also absolutely dehumanizing towards female and it's not surprising that so much controversy and debate rise-up on a high consciousness self-help forum with these underlying dynamics. Because at the end of the day, if it leads to this type of interaction, it is a lose-lose. Also, no conscious/developed woman will be attracted to a man resorting to this dynamic. The moment she sees that, it acts as a red flag. She understands that a man is not totally developed on the real attraction development line but is faking its attractive qualities toward gullible women and has drifted away from the real thing. She sees him as an "alchemist" praying on easy targets and that's adding up to the unattractiveness of the situation. But of course, most of the time the men are not aware of that fact and think the average women are normal while the conscious woman is deluded and a pain in the ass. But a developed man would be better off with a developed woman. Because relationship between men and female are not summarized to merely getting some sex. Sex is like 15-20% of a relationship at most.

Yes of course. Okay. No problem Good luck with everything!

Maybe there is also an element of shame due to the fact that by writing we are disclosing a part of ourself. And of course, very often we perceive ourself as unacceptable to be seen. We keep on protecting a thick private sphere and we have fear of intimacy because we are afraid of rejection in daily life. And getting tagged as "unlovable". Our authenticity has always been repressed in order to fit within a mold. Being authentic and drifting from the mold feels therefore feels bad to us. That is very interesting. Thanks for the info. It's great food for contemplation and I can relate to it. I had noticed that it was a question of self-image and contradiction between the idea you've got of yourself and the new elements you see. Perhaps a lot of the horror we feel is the gap between what we think we are and what we appear factually to be. The ignorance and lack of awareness tells us how "wrong" we are even in our knowledge of our egoic self. We see how limited our self-image is, really. From inside, the ego has the feeling to be always right. Its perceptions and narratives are truth to it. I think feeling cringe also comes more often to those who have a negative self-image by default. Often these people have lacked validation and a secure attachment from their caretakers. Or they grew up in an environment where they have been told a lot that what they were doing is not correct. It makes one particularly anxious about how one appear. And they constantly look back at how they are doing. And you've got a phenomenon of a by default negative self-image, judging itself from an external vantage point. The negative self-image becomes then judge and the party.

@StarStruck ??? I'm mind blown. Congratulation on your healing journey. I think that once you'll have healed most of your trauma with the Feminine things are going to get much easier for you, regarding dating/pick up. -- Yes. This type of stuff is always about our own relationship with the in Feminine/Masculine throughout our formative years and subsequently the adult ones. 100% on point . -- Since you are living in the Netherlands- you could also investigate on San Pedro/ Ayahuasca for healing since you were already interested in psychadelics. San Pedro can be brewed quite easily and I think it is even legal to consume in this country. I would also suggest you to read Erich Fromm, the Art of Loving (available as audiobook- even on Youtube), as well as content by Gabor Matè on authenticity vs attachment to get a better grasp at where it might have gone wrong for you.