While I doubt OP is truly a hopeless case this does remind me of a guy I know named Greg.
Greg is in his mid 30s, is 6’2, lean muscular like a swimmer, brown hair and brown eyes, and typically dresses well but not amazing.
Greg is the VP of marketing for a medium sized beverage company. He pulls down a respectable salary and lives in a big city with plenty of access to women.
He isn’t on the autism scale, doesn’t have any mental issues, and isn’t weird socially. Greg is no super extroverted social god by any means but he has plenty of friends and goes out often.
Greg has had several serious GFs and all of them were attractive and all were met from his social circle.
You would think that someone like Greg could learn game and become decent (at the very least) at cold approach pick up.
Thing is, Greg can not get laid if he life depended on it from cold approach.
I know all of this because Greg is a former client of mine.
He spent about six months reading various seduction books and blogs while approaching day and night game. He got no where so he hired a coach. The coach took him out and gave him some generic advice that had no effect.
Greg continues down this path and continues to approach women every week. He still has no results to show for it.
Greg ends up meeting me at a business function and we hit it off. It was by pure chance that we ended up on the topic of pick up and he told me his story. I was amazed that a guy like Greg wasn’t getting laid like crazy and told him about mpast as a dating coach. Turns out that he had even read some of my articles on a different forum that I was an admin on! Small world…
I take Greg out believing that he was overlooking something that was holding him back.
We start out with some day game the weekend following the business event. His first few approaches were less smooth than they could be but he did them with zero hesitation. After he was “warmed up” he did maybe 20 or 25 more approaches. With the exception of one very rude girl who was clearly having a bad day, the vast majority of his interactions were actually good. I seen no major red flags and he got some numbers.
I went though his phone and looked at his text game. His texting was perfectly fine yet no girl would ever actually meet up with him.
Side note: none of the women he got numbers from that day ever met up with him either.
We went back to the hotel to freshen up and eat and hit some bars and clubs that night. Once again, he approached with no hesitation and generally did pretty well. No lays for him that night but any night gamer, no matter how good they may be, will tell you they have nights where things go seemingly well but still don’t pull any. Shit happens…
The odd thing, however, is that EVERY night is like that for him. With his technical skills, looks, fundamentals, and the pure volume the dude puts in he should have been pulling every once in a while yet never did.
While I had a few tips for the dude none of them were big things. Overall, the dudes game seemed very decent and by all accounts the dude should get laid a fair bit.
He spent a few more months trying to figure it out before he met another girl through his social circle and is now serious and exclusive with her.
I’ve been in the seduction community for over 15 years now and I’ve met a few guys like Greg. For whatever reason, even though they are doing things right, they just can’t have any success with cold approach. I have no idea why.
But for every Greg out there, there are 50 dudes who THINK they are doing things right but in reality are fucking things up somewhere.
I knew a guy exactly like this. He'd been repeatedly cleared as "not autistic" by psychologists. He'd also worked with a variety of seduction coaches. He was a likable, friendly, sociable guy. Not super extroverted, but a good guy. Met up with many seducers and claimed they all said his game was fine and that he was better at approaching, opening, hooking, etc., than most guys they'd seen. Even better at it than some of them!
There was a certain rigidity to him. He was one-dimensional. We talk about
Byronic flaws... when I introduced him to that concept he said it'd be dishonest for him to present himself that way, since he had no hidden sides and what you see is what you get. He claimed dating coaches saw nothing wrong with his approaches. While a good guy, he lacked "depth" as a human being.
He was pretty repetitive. Like the guy you knew, he would go out and approach, approach, approach... no real approach anxiety. Mostly very polite interactions with women. He would sometimes get girls off cold approach. Very high flake rates and ghost rates, but if he did enough volume he'd get a girl. He estimated he needed 200 approaches to get a girl in bed and 500 approaches to get a girlfriend. None of his girlfriends were women he was happy with.
Getting a look at his long-term relationship behavior, I saw him missing subtle subtextual clues women were giving him that they wanted him to move things forward. A few times I told him explicitly to go get a girl back he'd let walk out of his life and exactly what to do, and he did it, and got the girl back, but then he'd let her go a little while later the same way, all while saying that she was the one who was apparently never serious about him (in his relationship reports, it was obvious the girl had been trying everything she could to get him to advance the relationship, but it all just went over his head).
It fooled me for a long time... what exactly was this guy's issue?
Ultimately after seeing tons of his behavior with women and having enough interactions with him where he'd say things that were thoughtful or polite but that missed the mark in some way with me I realized I had this feeling with him like... he is a really nice person, but everything feels just ever so slightly like he is doing things he thinks are correct to do, rather than because he feels like doing them. When I talked to him about this or that remark he made being somewhat off-base he would say things like, "Oh, sorry, I thought it was thoughtful for me to let you know I blah blah. Should I not do that?"
If you read about autistic mask-wearing, I concluded this was ultimately what it was: a high-functioning autistic guy with a mask that was constructed well enough that he blended in fairly well... just not well enough to get past most women's radars. It really took a while for it to come out though.
Your average psychologist is just a human being. If a high-functioning autistic comes in with a well-developed mask, it's pretty likely the psychologist is going to conclude this individual is not autistic.
For a while some mutual friends and I talked about this guy and wondered what the issue might be. If he wasn't autistic, he must have some kind of undiagnosed social handicap none of us could quite put our fingers on. We could all sort of sense it, and women obviously sensed it, but it was very difficult to describe.
I had to really get familiar with Asperger's to be able to get to a point where I felt confident saying, "This is a very high-functioning guy with Asperger's, with a very well-developed mask. But all the core symptoms are there: he's rigid, he thinks mechanically, he clearly has mind blindness, but it is all masked very well." It was most obvious in reading his long-term relationship reports, and generally in Asperger's, deeper into relationships is where the mask really starts to slip (you can develop a mask to cover the approach and early stages, but it gets impossible to maintain a full mask in an LTR. Things just get too complex for masks to keep working as well).
Here's a good article on Asperger's masks:
Hiding In Plain Sight: The Many Disguises of Adult Autism Spectrum Disorder - Appearing normal is not unusual for many adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder because they are hiding it. Mr. B is a
kennethrobersonphd.com
Mr. B is a congenial, likable, conscientious, hard-working, middle-aged man, married and the father of two lively children. He serves on the board of a local non-profit, is often asked to speak at fundraising events, is the star of his community softball team, and is considered an approachable, responsible colleague at work. By most definitions, he is a success.
Mr. B also has Autism Spectrum Disorder.
In my years of assessing adults for Autism Spectrum Disorder, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the ability of many people to mask who they really are and, by camouflaging the symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder, to blend in and appear normal.
Chase
