To Get Laid, You Have To Stop Trying To Get Laid

Mark Daniels9 years ago

I have a friend who, like many of us, has Tinder. Unlike many of us, however, he has not once done the sideways shuffle with a single wonderful maiden that he has matched with on the app. This is due to no shortcoming of his own. In fact, you might be surprised to hear that he excels at Tindering. He is a master Tinderer even — a virtuoso of wooing women he has just met and convincing them that he is a potential midnight mating partner in merely a few digital messages.

The sheer amount of phone numbers he has accumulated then promptly ignored and thrown away is truly impressive and simultaneously troubling. Most of these girls are fairly good looking, too. He’s not playing this game with trolls. Why the refusal to reap the fruits of his labor? Is he committed to celibacy? No, he’s taken his fair share of freshman home from the bars. Is he gay? No again. I can affirm that those freshmen were all female. The short answer for why he goes about Tindering like this is simple. He’s likely a borderline sociopath.

In his own words, “It’s all about the chase, man.” The thrill of convincing a girl to give her number to a guy that she doesn’t know outside of a handful of pictures on the interwebs is enough to get him off, I guess. No need for a sexual climax or anything. The act of deftly spitting game is enough of a rush in itself. He just loves being great at what he does, like the John Galt of Tinder. No blowjob needed.

He’s not entirely wrong in his praise of the chase, but he’s taking it to more of an extreme than most of us would.

GQ did a profile on Stephen Colbert last year that reaches depths far beyond what I’m referencing here. In it, Colbert says one of the most important lessons he was ever taught is that “you have to learn to love the bomb,” which he learned while performing improv in Northwestern’s theater program. He goes on to clarify that the sentiment isn’t to laugh about the failure or to get over it, it’s to really love messing up — to truly enjoy it. Loving the bomb, that terrible failure, is the way to cut through the fear of performing so you can actually begin to perform well. It seems to me that to love the bomb, you have to love doing improv in itself. You have to love it even when it doesn’t love you back.

The idea with Colbert and my friend is the same here. It’s also the reason Nick Saban is the Dark Lord of college football. They all share a singular focus on the process to the point of disregard for the actual goal. Stop worrying about the end result, the harvest, the fruits of your labor, the orgasm. Start enjoying whatever it is you’re doing for the simple reason that you enjoy doing it. Learn to love the chase, and learn to love when the chase ends in a wreck that looks like something Michael Bay would orchestrate. If you can enjoy what you’re doing — even when when you’re doing it poorly — you’ll probably end up doing it long enough to get pretty good at it..