It’s a common refrain from old hands in the Community that you should have a life outside of Game. As far back as Neil Strauss’ book he warned about how easy it is to become obsessed with pick up with it’s constant emotional rollercoaster resulting from the blowouts and successes. It’s easy to become addicted to new lays. It’s easy to lose all perspective on life as you focus single-mindedly on “getting this area handled”. Getting good at game without scorching the earth around your life is a difficult balance. Community values are weird – such as treating girls as experimental subjects and going out with wings like you’re a mercenary army. Yet if you don’t approach thousands of girls, push your boundaries, hang out with like-minded (and preferrably more experienced) men then how can you improve?

I think it’s impossible to get good at game without compromising your integrity at certain times. Lest anyone think I place myself above such base behaviours, I’ll use examples from my own development. Things I’ve done which I know are shady, but which I rationalised at the time as acceptable (and perhaps still do) include:

• Videoing girls during pick-up and dates and then sharing the videos on the internet
• Dating five girls at a time (who knew about each other) and telling each that she was my number one girl
• Passing girls on to my friends
• Telling a girl logically that I don’t want a serious relationship with her, and then shamelessly playing her emotions to make her fall for me in the full knowledge that they will override her logical mind

It’s easy to find justifications. People are all cunts. All is fair in love and war. They have their own agenda too. If we got married she’d use the misandrist laws against me. Etc etc etc.

I’m not so much interested in the moral dimension of integrity, not for this post anyway. What interests me is that integrity is essential for success in life even if you are merely using enlightened self interest rather than a genuine commitment to moral living for its own sake. I have long said:

High value women do not sleep with low value men

It’s possible to get Type 2 girls (high beauty / low self esteem) into bed with manipulative low value behviour yet it’s almost impossible to have rewarding relationships with them. I’ve met plenty of community guys who rack up lay-after-lay with grotty women, women of low character, or simply normal pretty girls where it begins ok and things turn south rapidly precisely because of the man’s conduct in his pursuit and subsequent relationship. For whatever reason these men feel compelled to stay on the treadmill day-after-day, night-after-night trying to placate whatever demons rest inside them, pouring ever more water into a leaky bucket rather than fixing the hole in the bottom. RSD’s Jeffy gave a great talk about this in Transformations.

What all these guys have in common is a manipulative, value-taking frame that requires vast amounts of lying and dishonesty. No amount of lays is ever enough. It’s like they are punishing themselves week after week. Invariably they surround themselves with like-minded people and then there’s a self-reinforcing echo chamber. Fucked up community standards become the norms that define their conduct. In the beginning their vibe is horrible, completely creepy. As they become more accomplished liars they can disguise the ugliness within until they have obtained whatever value they were seeking to take.

It is still possible to get laid like this. There’s lots of weak girls in the world who can be impressed, cajoled and manipulated into bed. You can spend years feeding in such swamps. With success comes hubris. Rather than remain within the normal world with its normal standards of behaviour you see yourself as an outsider, a man above the “sheep” and no longer constrained by societal rules (which are “all in your head” anyway). Channelled correctly this is a stunning realisation that leads to achievement and inner peace as you cast off the shackles. Channelled incorrectly you become a lame douchebag – never keeping promises, living life on a whim, treating people as pawns to be sacrificed. Like an over-leveraged hedge fund picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, you can go years before your risk-taking wipes you out. One day’s reversal will overwhelm four years of small gains but the homo-sapien is designed to pat itself on the back for every small gain while sticking it’s head in the sand about impending losses. When you jump off a 42 floor building you have an exhillirating ride the first 41 floors you pass.

A man’s word is the only thing of value he will ever own

Much of the discussion on this blog has been about how the type of man you are drives your game, and vice versa. I firmly believe that the only way to avoid the biggest player traps is to conduct yourself with girls (and other men) according to the type of man you wish to be. That means you:

• Aim high, at precisely the girls you most want in your life
• Make your intentions clear at the earliest moment of good calibration
• Decide if you intend to string a girl along you tell her and treat her hind brain the same way
• Abide by wing rules at all times, such as not making your wing look bad in front of a girl or trying to steal his girl
• Maintain a life outside of the Community
• Identify and slay your inner demons, rather than appeasing them

It is extremely difficult to do this. Most guys who get good with girls do so precisely because they are broken inside and driven to extraordinary lengths to make up for it. Normal people with balanced lives give up long before they complete their “1,000 sets of hell”. It’s simply too hard. You can only do it when the wolves are at the door. In my case, it was the various issues emanating from my divorce. For other people I’ve met it’s 20+ years of involuntary celibacy or social exclusion, messed up father figures, alcoholism and redemption, and so on.

If you want to lift yourself out of whatever gutter you currently reside in, you need to develop personal integrity. Without it, a conveyor belt of new lays will never fill the emptiness inside.