As you spend more time in the company of fellow daygamers, taking that long sordid fulfilling journey together, you start to encounter things the PUA marketing materials never prepared you for. All that polyanna-ish double-talk of banging tens every night with your rejection-free game, your rock-star level / instructor-level performance…. blah blah…. bullshit….. life just isn’t like that. I’m reminded when I see painted advertising boards outside steak houses of happy-looking cows. I think… hang on, that cow could only be smiling like that if he doesn’t know he’s about to be carved up and eaten.

I digress.

Game is tough. Really really tough. For most men it’s the toughest thing they’ll ever do, casting aside their protective buffers and facing incredible levels of rejection and ego death. The rewards come in but you’d better prepare yourself for some long dark nights of the soul. So it’s refreshing when I’m going through a rough patch and I hear Steve (or Tom, or Jon or whoever) talk about their own encounters with the darkness. There’s so much PUA happy-talk and internet alpha posturing out there that an aspiring player could be forgiven for thinking he’s the only guy in the community who can’t hack it. Once you’re in with a solid crew you quickly realise that everyone has their demons and everyone has their tough periods. That’s normality.

Let me tell you about my most recent one.

I’m on my third day of number farming in Riga when I stop a dusky dark-haired beauty near the train station. It’s super-on, eye-spazz, close-distance sparkle. We are deeply eye-fucking from the beginning. After ten minutes or so I take the number and we meet late that evening. It’s my first date with a local. She takes me to a hotel rooftop bar where I force a kiss close in the lift on the way down to the second venue. I’m starting to see red flags but she’s got just the look I like, almost Turkish. She’s fighting off the kiss too much even though her hindbrain is well on, she tells me she’s married but separated, and after the second drink I try to extract and she bursts into tears. Oh dear….. a drama queen with volatile emotions. I do sympathise because going through a divorce is tough so I give alot of comfort and decide to steer well clear.

She adds me to Facebook and starts chasing, and then through text.

It’s one of those weird scenarios where her forebrain is in full “don’t fuck” mode but her hindbrain can’t stop moving her feet closer to me. I’m occupied with other leads and by Saturday I’m suddenly six days into the holiday and haven’t been laid. Tom sets up a double first date with a hot sleazy girl who has a boyfriend but is super horny. As we sit back on Cafe X sofas Tom’s girl turns up with her blonde friend, about 9pm. Both girls are well up for it but it’s weird. They are little madams and don’t even order a drink. After twenty minutes or so of strong eye contact and subtle kino they suddenly put their coats on and leave. We don’t chase. My girl has been texting for the past two hours to bait me into inviting her out so I get her to show up ten minutes later (with a blonde friend). The Cafe X staff are giving us funny looks because we’ve done almost all our dates here and without even getting out of our sofas we’ve just replaced a departing two-set with a new one.

The friend really likes Tom. She’s no oil painting but at the borderline-boiler threshold where you start thinking “if it’s easy, I’ll have it”. Inexplicably her brother shows up too. My girl is immediately on but I’m anticpating hardcore LMR so I decide to continue the pressure-cooker method, namely:

Lull a girl into chasing your hard by keeping your text replies brief and never taking her bait to invite her out. If she really wants you she’ll amp up her investment and make ever more blatant come-ons until she’s inviting herself out. Then when she arrives, make her talk and use subcommunication to heat her up without ever giving her a kiss or a statement that releases the sexual tension. The idea is to build her pressure so high the slightest prick will cause the volcano to erupt (and ideally that overcomes the LMR).

So I’m eye-fucking her and we’re just face-to-face on the sofa doing deep hypnotic scanning. Her face is fully monged with slack jaw, drooping eyes and lip-quivering. I boil her in that for twenty minutes before finally extracting. Tom decides to isolate his girl (it doesn’t work out that way but that’s a story for him to tell). So I walk my girl straight back to the apartment and into the bedroom. She’s gagging for it but there’s still a good fifteen minutes of LMR till I finally fuck her.

The moment I shoot my bolt I regret it. She’s not ugly, far from it. Her face is a solid eight and even though she’s carrying a bit of chub she’s still a respectable notch. The problem is the red flags that I ignored in my sex-goggled haze are now waving in full glory. All those little comments on dates and in texts about latching onto me and building it up like a Hollywood romance. Her clinginess. And then the final straw is when I walk her home. She’s trying to call her friend to cockblock Tom out of malicious spite. Bitches be crazy. Fortunately he’s in a basement nightclub somewhere so there’s no reception and I persuade her to just go home to sleep, thinking that’s the end of it. Oh no.

I’m feeling pretty grotty. I just pushed a vulnerable girl into fast sex and now she’s latching on bigtime even though I never pretended it was anything other than sex. I didn’t much enjoy the experience and now I’m in the post-sex low where my testosterone has dropped and I’m tired, thinking of ways to get rid of her. I figure I’m feeling so grotty I might as well revel in it so I head off to Hessburger and order the most unhealthy happy meal on the menu. As I’m sipping Coke and eating a past-midnight double cheeseburger Tom sends a text:

“Your girl is cockblocking me. I’m outside the apartment.”

Fuck. I’ve often written about wing rules and now I have to put my money where my mouth is and re-engage a girl I’m trying to shuffle quietly away from. I call her up knowing full-well this is just adding post-sex comfort that will latch her on like a barnacle to the hull of the goodship Krauser. I just need to keep her talking as long as possible to stop her using her phone to cockblock Tom. I spend ten minutes describing in detail my happy meal, getting her to translate the Hessburger nutrional information leaflets. Then another ten minutes trying to NLP her into going to sleep. Twenty minutes is all I can stand before leaving Tom to the vagaries of fate.

Sneaking back into the apartment there’s two pairs of shoes by the door and my bedroom door is shut. Tom had needed to open the window to clear the sex smell (apparently it smelled so bad his girl wouldn’t go in at first) and kick the period-blooded condom under the bed. As I tiptoe into the lounge when her phone rings loud enough to raise the dead and the caller ID says its my girl. I reject the call and power down her device then stretch out on the sofa hidden under a blanket until Tom finishes his dirty deed. Ten minutes later I hear two sets of footsteps and  Tom whispering “that’s Nick. He texted me he’d been drinking, so he’ll be unconscious” while I feign snoring. The girl tiptoes out saying “My friend won’t have had sex with him. She’s still married” and “Don’t tell her what happened between us”.

Tom later tells me his girl had been trying to ruthlessly cockblock me while mine did the same, calling his girl and saying things like “don’t go into the apartment, come and have a tea with me”.

What a squalid episode. I didn’t get into the Game to clack girls like this. Tom and I commiserate each other on our shameful new notches then retire to our respective quarters. For at least an hour I can’t sleep, just wondering what’s driving me to put myself into these situations thousands of kilometres from home. Fortunately the events of the next two days completely restore my faith in humanity and the joy of chasing sweetly feminine girls. I put this down as a temporary wobble.