lol
@alleniverson,
Cheers man. I try to keep it as balanced as possible, to avoid any extreme or irresponsible advice. That's definitely a concern once you know eyes are on you... "I hope I'm not saying anything that may potentially lead people astray." I hope I do okay on that, but you never know who's taking what thing you said what way, of course.
What I'd point out here is there is a difference between 'compartmentalization' and 'adopting/showcasing different personas'.
I am the same guy no matter who I'm with. When I was in my teens I experimented with 'different personas for different audiences' but like you said it gets confusing and after a while I decided it'd be more fun to just surprise everybody by showing them that 'actually Chase isn't really like that... really he is this other way'.
I spent time in my early 20s still doing some 'different personas around different groups' thing, until eventually I realized I was trying to blend in more to be better liked, and started feeling slimy about that.
So I switched it to, "How can I be ME completely, while being among totally different groups of people, and still be cool to them / not alienate them?" So I just focused on turning myself into the coolest, most socially comfortable version of myself, who could just be himself anywhere, thrown in with any group, and people would just say, "That guy's pretty cool."
The only time I feel pressure to 'act like someone else' is in those rare instances where I find myself COMPLETELY out of my element, with some group of people where there's a lot of posing and posturing and I don't have any real allies. It happens occasionally... when that happens you just have to remind yourself, "If you're trying to act like someone else, you're going to look try-hard, and then you really WILL suck."
(it's almost like I'm saying "just be yourself"... egads... really what I am saying though is have a unified persona, that is the coolest / suavest version of yourself, and be that everywhere)
Now beyond that, I am still compartmentalizing. For instance:
- If I'm with a woman, I'm cool/suave me, but I won't talk about doubts/fears I have about anything (except in rare circumstances), because she'll think me weak, and I won't talk about longer term ambitions, because she'll think I'm insane. I won't talk about pickup much and won't reveal any connection with the seduction space because it damages my frame, which is "Hey woman, you chased me, I didn't chase you, this whole 'you and me' thing is your doing!"... well if you spend years learning pickup and go out specifically to pick up and teach guys to pick up, then no, it pretty much is going to seem to her like you chased her
- If I'm with someone who views me as a guru, I won't talk about mundane life, because then you see the guy realize you are just a man like he is and it's like some of the inspiration goes out of his eyes!
- If I'm with a good friend who's good with girls and is similarly wildly/insanely ambitious I can talk about anything, except those things he may not be into or that set him off... e.g., I have a lot of friends with leftwing and rightwing apocalyptic views that I will mostly only discuss around the margins with because if you get too deep they start talking about how it's incontrovertible fact, at which point you're just annoying each other... so I know to avoid those topics... or some friends are super materialist / non-spiritual -- well I won't talk about spiritual stuff with them, because they think it's all loopy / faulty thinking stuff... some friends are VERY spiritual, in which case I avoid too much materialist conversation with them, because they'll think you're too stuck in the world and missing the big picture... etc.
So really it is just about knowing which topics you need to self-censor on.
I've never met another human being I could totally not self-censor with. Probably if I was more 'normal' I could find some really good friends and a soul mate or something and just share all my thoughts and opinions and they'd be like "Yeah totally, I'm exactly that way too!" but once you get too far afield from normality you're basically plugged into too many things that are too far out for any one person to connect with.
Honestly, I am super open-minded, but all my smart, creative, independent-thinker friends also have a bunch of things they subscribe to that seem wrongheaded / far out to me. If I'm curious about it I might urge it on but usually I just change the subject if it comes up. Compartmentalization... if he's an apocalypse guy, he's got other friends who are all about the apocalypse he can talk to about that; me, I'm his "everything but the apocalypse" friend.
Anyway, that is the key: compartmentalizing
facts/conversation topics, but NOT your persona -- your persona is the same everywhere.
@Skills,
Yes, you mostly have pickup guys or relationship guys.
You get guys like David Shade or Franco from mASF who were great at relationships but not good PUAs... then you get guys like Mystery who are great PUAs but their relationships are dumpster fires.
It's the "limited time in life / limited energy / limited foci in what you specialize in" conundrum. If you want to get good at PUA, you need a lot of time being single where you can pick up, but every guy meets girls he wants to hang onto now and again, so usually you are only going to become good at PUA if women don't want you for relationships or you self-sabotage them for some reason or have an avoidant attachment style, etc.
Conversely, if you're good at relationships, you're going to tend to have long stretches of inactivity from gaming, which makes it hard to keep up skills... you also simply are not going to have the raw time-in-field a very talented PUA will have, and probably not the hunger... most relationship guys want a good relationship more than they want to bang a continuous stream of fresh tail.
But there are exceptions... the guy I learned from always had a few mLTRs going on, one that lasted at least 8 years... but he was just constantly, constantly picking up new girls. Another guy I learned from was similar... always a rotation going, some FWBs, some mLTRs, but always taking new girls. I learned a lot about both pickup and relationships from both men. I think the thing both these guys had going was both a quest for new tail and a desire to possess a woman completely... my second friend told me once, "If I don't hear back from a girl after I shag her, it makes me feel a little bad... I'm not JUST trying to bang these girls! I want to keep them coming back!"
Oh okay. I'm talking about guys running moderately to very successful businesses that suck up lots of their time either managing advertising campaigns or running coaching workshops/bootcamps... it's a full time job if it's that. Usually guys are just like "Well, it's my full time job, I can't hide it, might as well get her involved, it might be fun," and at that point you know how it's going to go. If you've seen it once, you've seen it a hundred times...
Maybe it's different if it's just a little side thing though; I don't have good data points on that.
There's a difference between betaization and "there's shit I'm doing the chick I'm in a serious relationship legitimately doesn't like for social standing / insecurity reasons, and maybe I really should do something else."
If you're doing stuff that looks skeezy, like porn advertising, and your chick is religious or cares about her social standing, that sort of thing is going to bother her. You can try reframing that... "No, you see, I am
leading men away from porn, helping them to get real women in the real world. It's a service I'm offering! I'm doing what you want!" but she still knows you are running all these ads with dripping vaginas and big bobbling tits and throbbing cocks in them, and this adult sales letter with all that too. If she brings it up again you can try reframing again, but it won't work as well the second time... even less the third... You can try to tell her "Not gonna change, sorry bitch, like it or get lost, #alpha4life!" but you and I both know that's not how you run a healthy relationship.
It's basically always going to bother her, forever, just like if she went out to the bars and got drunk, not often, but sometimes, and came home late, not super late, but late enough you didn't know
for sure, it would bother you, always, no matter how she reframed it, even if everything else in the relationship was great.
The only way for it to stop being a bother, once it is out there and known, is for the thing to ultimately be removed.
Create enough discomfort for her, and she will create discomfort for you, until you address the issue with a solution both can be satisfied with.
There's no way around the fact that even if you lead very strongly, your woman still gets a 'vote' in the relationship, and if she highly objects to stuff you're doing she is going to start voting against it and making life increasingly miserable... not everything can be infinitely reframed... sometimes you've really got to ditch the girl or ditch the thing driving a wedge into the relationship.
I've heard this over and over again in the PUA community, and they often are, but let's not be over simplistic.
I had a teacher in high school, a religious school, who was a cool, likable guy all the girls had crushes on. One day he told us about his fiancée, they were months away from being married, dated for two years but never had sex, he believed in no sex before marriage, and she just went crazy pushing him: "We have to have sex. We're getting married; we've got to have sex now. We HAVE to have sex!"
He kept telling her no, no, it's just a few more months, we'll be married in a few months. Finally she told him "Have sex with me or I call the engagement off."
So he went, prayed under an apple tree for a sign from God, an apple fell, and he took that as his sign to let the relationship fall, so he broke up with her. A while later she returned to him and said he really was the one for her, and she wanted to marry him, but she wanted to have sex. He said no, so she left.
He was still torn up about it, conflicted, bitter, talking about "Maybe I should just go around having sex with everyone!", not really meaning it.
I have seen other guys whose relationships ended when the woman gave an ultimatum, the man refused the woman's terms, and she just left.
Not all these guys had poor relationship game. I have known multiple guys with good relationship game who had relationships end over ultimatums from women.
Honestly a lot of the time I see the ultimatums girls are giving these guys and I am like, "Well why DIDN'T you want to do that? Her thing seems like a normal, reasonable request. Did you just not want the girl and wanted it to end?" and the guy says no, he wanted the girl. "But not enough to do this thing that seems like a normal, reasonable thing?" I ask. But I guess every guy has his particulars.
I don't know if I'd call it "always a sign of helplessness." I have seen a lot of relationships end over ultimatums where a few years later the girl is happily married while the guy is still drifting along uncertain. If it's 'helplessness' I guess it's better to be the helpless party who knows what she wants and goes and gets it than the 'helpful' party who floats along in uncertainty.
I think the real thing ultimatums are are, rather than 'helplessness', a sign someone has reached the end of his rope.
For women a lot of the time they need to push themselves to end things that are shaping up to not give them what they want... it's not easy to walk away from a relationship you're invested in. An ultimatum is a way for her to declare to the man and herself that things need to change in a positive direction or she needs to get out and find a more compatible mate.
All I'll say is I have heard many a man over the years say, "No woman would do that to me," or, "That kind of thing wouldn't happen to me," only to meet him years later and he's got this dazed expression telling you about this thing that happened to him, and you're like...
hey wasn't that the thing you said would never happen?
Better known as the "don't jinx yourself, brah" line of philosophy
Some chicks are definitely cooler with it earlier on.
In my experience on a long-enough time scale every chick's coolness with PUA drops to zero... but you might be able to get a few years of her mostly being pretty chill about it or even cheerleading it first.
Oh yeah!
It's not that hard to manage.
Set up two accounts on your computer. One work, one personal. Put PUA on work.
If there's a woman in the room, work stays closed. If work is open and she walks in, switch to personal.
Personally I cannot get any kind of focused work OR good conversations to people about anything etc. done if there's someone hanging around paying looking over my shoulder who is not also privy to that discussion. Maybe just me?
Chase
