Common Magic Bullets That Guys Hope Will Cure Their Fear Of Women

Approaching strange girls is nerve racking for most guys. And unlike a looming job interview or presentation, it's also totally optional. That means it's incredibly easy to wimp out at the last second as the anxiety builds and builds. So most guys go through a phase of looking for the magic bullet that will cure their nervousness around women once and for all. Some guys enter this phase and never quite leave it, always looking for that next possibility and holding out hope.

Of course there is no magic bullet. But that doesn't stop everyone from looking. To hopefully save you a few wasted months, here are some common magic bullets guys try, and why they don't really work.

The Life Changing Realization

Also known as the, the Life Changing Epiphany, The Life Changing Insight, and The Life Changing Observation.

These are a dime a dozen and you can easily find a couple by dropping by your favorite forum devoted to picking up girls. You'll also tend to come up with them spontaneously if you sit down and think through your problems or write about them in a journal. The hope behind them is that some piece of information is going to realign the way you look at the world so radically that your fear of women will completely disappear, or at least become manageable. Here are some examples, though there are dozens of other common ones I can't think of at the moment:

The big characteristic of these supposed realizations is that they feel really profound and life changing at the time. You may feel giddy or like everything is going to be okay from now on. Thinking "Oh my God! It's so simple!!!", or "That's it!" isn't uncommon.

Unfortunately the feeling doesn't last. It wears off and was more of a temporary psych up you gave yourself rather than anything lasting. Also, these epiphanies tend not to lead to much in terms of real world results. You may walk around for a day or two feeling like you're more fearless or effective around women, but you probably still won't physically do anything. Or if you do manage to do better, the success won't be sustainable.

You can almost get hooked on these realizations. I went through a phase where this happened to me. You feel bad. You think over your problems and come up with some earth shattering, yet simple, solution. You feel changed up and hopeful. The feeling dissipates and you feel bad again. You think up another insight into the nature of the world and get that boost again. The cycle repeats. Within a month the effect of each new epiphany 'hit' isn't as strong. You can think up new realizations and forget them completely within half an hour.

The underlying problem with these psuedo-magic epiphanies is that the mind can't maintain a feeling or an emotion indefinitely. Within a few days any unusually charged up, happy, or confident mood you may have had will go away. A similar problem is that you can't just conjure up whatever emotion/attitude/mindset you want to feel on command. You can't make yourself hold a certain attitude just because you logically realize it's good to believe. You can change your thinking, but it takes time. You can sort of influence your thoughts (e.g., listening to driving music, reading motivational material, being physical), but never as reliably as you wish you could. They also speak to a larger self-help misconception that everything is already within you and you just need the right stimulus to bring it out. But there isn't a super confident, courageous version of you locked up deep in your psyche. You can temporarily get on a high, or get in a zone, and feel like that person, but it never lasts. Eventually the status quo returns.

The thing is, many of the concepts behind the realizations aren't invalid, and you may one day incorporate them into your overall sense of confidence, but they don't work as diamond bullets that are going to pierce your mind and change your life in one instance.

Logical explanations for why you shouldn't be scared

These are the close cousin of the Life Changing Realization. They can create the same misleading euphoric feelings that the epiphanies can, but their focus is more on explaining why interacting with women is nothing to be scared of. Examples:

These may make you feel better for a moment, but they're a flawed concept because anxiety isn't rational. If something makes you nervous, it makes you nervous. You can't logically reason your fears away. Your anxiety doesn't care if there's really nothing to be scared off. It's too primitive and biological an emotion. I've concluded the only real solution is to face the feared situation enough that you get used to it. Hopefully with enough exposure the anxiety will recede far into the background.

Most guys get nervous when they have to talk to a strange woman, or make a 'move' on (e.g., ask out, try to kiss, try to sleep with) someone they like. It doesn't matter why it happens. It just does and there isn't much you can do about it without a lot of work. Even then, it'll probably always be there to some degree. It could come back at any moment. Not what you want to hear, and not something most guys really accept and admit to themselves right away, but most likely the truth.

The perfect, flawless technique

This is really gets into naive, pie-in-the-sky territory. Some guys hold out looking for that magical technique for talking to and seducing women that's so powerful and effective that they'll never be scared to use it. It will be so amazing and reliable that the guy will never face rejection. Right now I'm getting this mental image of a dorky guy bolting up to a hot girl from out of nowhere, loudly blurting some arcane lines at her, then darting back into the background. The girl's face goes blank as the lines take effect on her mind and within seconds she's lustily homing in on the guy.

Obviously this is unrealistic, but plenty of product's sales copy has played to these fantasies. Many of them do sell, so this thinking does affect some people. I also think guys can become afflicted with a more subtle version of this particular magic bullet hunt; They're not searching for a completely mythical technique, but they're holding out for advice that's just a little more simple and a little more palatable than what they've read so far. I guess this isn't totally irrational, but it can insidiously eat away at your time.

Reading certain promising pieces of advice can also give you that fleeting rush of faux-confidence. Like you think you're finally going to have the balls to get out there because you're armed with this particularly good information now.

Getting repeatedly shot down on purpose

This is a fairly common piece of advice that I've seen come from a few sources. The idea is that you get over your fear of rejection once and for all by purposely crashing and burning several times. Often the advice tells you to get rejected by acting in a particularly weird, obnoxious, or outlandish way. A subtler variation isn't to outright get rejected, but to generally draw negative attention to yourself from the crowd.

I think this type of advice has its uses, but it isn't the cure-all it's made out to be. If you're so scared to talk to women that this is the only way you can initially do so, then something is better than nothing. Also, it can help build up your tolerance for rejection. Overall though, I'm not a fan of this concept.

Its critical flaw is that deep down you know this is just a silly game, and that the women aren't rejecting the real you, just your over the top behavior. It's much harder to try to meet a woman by putting your real self on the line. It's relatively easy to face disapproval when you're hiding behind a character.

Next, getting over your fear of women is a drawn out, multi-step process. No one outing, no matter how effective, will inoculate you for the rest of your life. It's like exercise, you have to build up your courage over time and then maintain it. The fear will always regroup given enough time.

But the thing I really don't like about this is that I think it comes from, and encourages, a weird, somewhat unsociable, frame of mind. The idea behind this exercise is to purposely act so strange or obnoxious that you annoy people into rejecting you. You're being weird and annoying for your own gain and amusement. Is this really the mind set you want to be approaching social interactions from? I used to be a pretty weird, geeky guy (and still am to a degree), and I remember doing an exercise like this and being a little too into, and good at, the whole 'act strange and mess with people' angle. Personally, I think one of the cornerstones to doing well with women is to become a more socially savvy, cool person. This isn't how genuinely cool people treat others.

Not masturbating to build up your motivation

I've noticed individual guys tend to independently come up with this idea fairly regularly. The concept is that if you stop masturbating completely, and tell yourself that the only way you're allowed sexual release is with a girl, your sex drive/motivation will build up so much that you'll no longer be scared of women. Your desperate biological urges will override your fear.

This advice also has its uses, but it's unfortunately not a magic bullet either. I tried it out in the depths of my desperation and ineptitude with women, so I can speak from experience when I say it doesn't work.

And what's the problem? Well, not masturbating will give you a boost in motivation. But not enough of one. If you visualize being able to talk to a girl in a bar for the first time in your life as a 200 foot wide canyon, then not masturbating will let you jump across an extra 10 feet or so. If you're hopelessly nervous around women, just not jerking off won't provide the boost you require. After a few weeks of no results the temptation to fall off the wagon will be too great to resist.

But if you're almost there, but you just need a little extra push, then this may put you over the edge. I think this advice would work better on a guy who knows how to get laid, has gotten laid before, but is just a bit lazy and chickenshit about getting out there and going for it.

I do sympathize with the related advice to not look at porn (and hence masturbate) because it just makes you feel bad or twists your expectations towards women. I think every lonely guy has spent a depressing Friday night looking at porn, then feeling like a loser after he was finished. "I need a real woman. I feel like a failure. My life sucks, here I am jerking off again when I should be out."

My personal view towards masturbation isn't to deny yourself. It's fun and not doing it isn't all that useful, so why deprive yourself? You can harness it in better way anyways. You can use your sex drive to encourage you to meet certain goals you have trouble with. Say you want to talk to more women or ask a certain girl out (don't pick something too huge and impossible though, choose manageable objectives that you just need a little extra push on). Well no more whacking off til you do it. That'll force your hand a little. And once you do meet your goal, you get to reward yourself. You can use the same principles with other things that motivate you (e.g., using the computer) but the sex drive is a pretty strong, consistent need in most guys. Okay, enough talking about jerking off already.

Various new-agey or scientifically questionable practices

Learning to get better with women is self-help, and self-help is never more than a step or two away from various types of new-agey or scientifically dubious ideas. The idea behind these is to either make yourself confident effortlessly, or somehow bring women into your life.

Okay, before I list some examples, I don't mean to imply that all of these are completely useless, or that no one can get some use of of them, just that most people would say the jury is still out. There are reasons to be skeptical about some of their claims and the mainstream scientific community is far from accepting of them:

My own slant is to be fairly (okay, really) skeptical, especially of the later items on the list. I actually think hypnosis is cool though and have played around with it. But while I think it's an interesting mental state people can enter into, I don't think you can use it to instantly program radical behavioral changes into your subconscious. It doesn't really work that way. Studies show it has more to do with how much you expect it to help you as anything. And there should be a lot more fearless lady's men out there if every guy who tried using this stuff to become confident saw results.


Some Related Articles:

How To Get More Comfortable Talking To Strange Girls
Trying To Learn How Up Pick Up Girls Can Sidetrack Very Inexperienced Guys
People Skills And Basic Attractiveness - A Foundation For Doing Well With Women
Three Main Areas Sexually Inexperienced Guys Need To Work On
Why Sexually Inexperienced Guys Shouldn't Be Too Picky With Women

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