I hope everyone enjoyed Part 1 of my story. Read on to find out about my journey since college:
After college I moved to New York and got an apartment with two friends from school. We had a great time living together, went out every weekend, hosted parties, and stayed up late talking about everything from girls to careers to politics. Tyler moved to Chicago, but we’ve remained close. Despite the demands of work, I kept making fitness and dating priorities. I went from 165 lbs to 185 lbs the first couple years after college and have since gotten up to about 200 lbs at roughly my original level of body fat. I downloaded the dating apps and went on more dates than I remember, initially with mixed results. But a few months later I started dating a great girl who I found super attractive. I couldn’t believe how different it felt to have a girl I looked forward to sleeping with every night.
In other ways, this time was a bit of a slump for me. One of my roommates was only in New York because he hoped to find a job there, but ended up leaving after finding a job in another city. And my other roommate was in a rotational program at work that required him to move after several months. So before long, I found myself living with two strangers. They weren’t bad roommates, but we never really clicked. My job wasn’t terrible, but it was duller than I expected and also felt less impactful. So after a couple years, I decided to transition from this job to working at a fast-growing startup. The company had a cool culture, a strong team, and a seemingly bright future. But this move ended up being a mistake. Less than a year after I started, the company shut down and laid off their entire staff. My previous company wasn’t hiring at the moment, and I didn’t have enough savings to last long in New York without income. So I decided to move back in with my parents, who had moved back to Florida, while I searched for another job.
The few months I stayed with my parents were difficult. My mother had learned to let go a little and my father’s hard personality had softened somewhat, but they were still very much the same parents I had always known. After a couple months of unsuccessfully searching for opportunities that would allow me to move back to New York, I ran across a great job opportunity in Florida, in the city where my parents lived. I had never considered staying there long-term, but this job really seemed like a good fit. And plus, I was getting tired of being unemployed and living with my parents, so I was desperate for a way out. So I took the job and moved into an apartment in a trendy area of the city. At first, the job seemed like another bust. I was assigned to a nightmare of a boss and was tasked with work that was far below my capabilities. But things started to change quickly, and I soon found myself in a great professional situation. I was making good money, working on reasonably interesting things, and I had a boss who gave me a lot of flexibility. This meant I had the freedom and time to explore a lot of other things, from a side business to finally getting serious about improving my dating life.
I thought back to my conversations with Tyler in college when he would throw around terms like PUA and RSD and talk about girls he had met at bars. At the time, it seemed like he had a superpower. But now, I had a good physique, a good job, lots of interesting stories, and more confidence than ever before. So it was finally time to make the leap.
I still didn’t have nearly the confidence for cold approach so I started by downloading every dating app I could think of. Within a few weeks, I matched with a girl so attractive I almost deleted her because I thought she was a spam bot. She was of mixed Indian and white ancestry, had this great exotic skin tone, a slender body but with full C-cup breasts and a tight, juicy ass, and a gorgeous face. And to top it off, she was into nude modeling. Most of her pictures showed her without a top, without bottoms, or without any clothes at all, with the good stuff covered up in playful ways. I was so proud of myself for matching with her that I masturbated to her pictures as soon as I got home. But never did I imagine I could actually have sex with her. Imagine my surprise when she writes back to my message, agrees to a date, and says yes when I invite her back to my place after. We’re making out and tearing off each other’s clothes within seconds of getting into my apartment and before I know it I’m balls deep in one of the sexist girls I’ve ever seen.
Unfortunately this girl was leaving town soon and we never got to meet up again. But that night was a turning point. I knew I wanted more. More nights like that. More girls like her. The ability to confidently get with someone like her again.
I had a bit of a hot streak that started after that. I was meeting, dating, and fucking new girls left and right. Some from the apps, some I met through friends or at parties. Some weeks I’d have dates with three different girls in a week, and they almost always ended in sex. A few of these girls became medium-term FWBs, a few of them I saw three or four times, and a few were one night stands. I slept with everyone from a 40-year old cougar who didn’t look a day over 29 and pampered me like a king every time I walked into her apartment to a 19-year old smokeshow who was sucking my cock in the backseat of my car within an hour of meeting her. And I had a great time with every one of them. I loved every part of the experience. Meeting a girl for the first time, getting to know her, hearing her story, the adrenaline that surged when I invited her back to my place, and the rush of making out once the door closed, seeing her naked body for the first time, pleasing her sexually, getting pleasure from her, and the sense of accomplishment and relaxation afterwards. Maybe I ended up getting a little too into it. By the end of that year I had had sex with 15 new girls, plus a few more where we just fooled around in bed and I maybe got a blowjob. But this helped my confidence shoot through the roof. Before all this started, I still felt like a guy who was fundamentally bad with women but happened to get lucky a few times. Now I knew that wasn’t true. I started to become more confident in my value to women, which also helped raise my confidence around other guys. Up until this point, I still hadn’t shaken some of my old insecurities. I viewed guys who I thought were good with women with jealousy and felt insecure around them. These feelings all but vanished over the course of that year.
But in other ways, this was a lonely time for me. None of my college friends were living in Florida, and the city where I was living had a pretty small young professional scene. I wasn’t surrounded by friends all the time the way I was during my first several months in New York, and making new friends proved challenging. In hindsight, I think this taught me the important lesson of self-reliance. In the past, my tendency was to build my social life off of a more popular friend’s social life. But that wasn’t a choice anymore. Feeling lonely forced me to go out and make friends for myself, and during those two years in Florida I ended up making as many true, long-term friends than I did during my entire time in college and in New York combined. I may not have had the huge groups of friends I dreamed of in college and briefly experienced in New York, but I still made friendships that mattered.
Along the way, I decided I finally wanted to cross the last hurdle of my seduction journey and get into cold approach. I met up with a guy from my local RSD group and hit the bars with the goal of meeting girls. My first couple times were total failures. I couldn’t initiate an approach to save my life and would suggest we leave every bar before any hot girls could arrive and make me feel like a failure for not approaching them. I eventually got the hang of it and really started to have fun with it. I’ll admit, the vast majority of the girls I’ve slept with I’ve met either through the apps or through my social circle. But the confidence I gained from knowing that I can go up and talk to any attractive girl I see has been pretty amazing.
In spite of the breakthroughs I was making in my dating life and social life, I was feeling stuck careerwise. My job was starting to get boring and my company didn’t offer an immediate path to advancement. So I decided to go back to school for my MBA. Even if my life outside of work for the last couple years had been dominated by lifting weights, casual sex and dating, and making new friends – all the things I thought I was too smart for in college – I knew I still had enough inner nerd to crush the GMAT and get into a good school. Sure enough, I aced the GMAT, wrote some solid essays, and got accepted to a top 10 program on the east coast. Getting into business school was exciting for a number of reasons. Of course I was excited about the career prospects and the doors that the school would open. But I was just as excited about showing up to school as this new version of myself, someone completely different than I was the last time I set foot in a classroom.
After getting into business school, I kept living my best life, even chiller than before now that I was planning to leave my job soon. I was hooking up with a couple new girls a month, making good progress in the gym, traveling across the country to see friends, and working on a side business. Of course, I wish I could say this was the end of all my problems. That my self-transformation had turned me into someone who handled everything with ease and never struggled. I wish it were that easy.
For reasons I can’t explain, but I suspect had something to do with a combination of an injury in the gym and some serious problems with the side business I was working on, I had a bout of depression in the months before school. I had never experienced anything like this since high school, so the fact that I was experiencing it after years of self-improvement was especially troubling to me. Therapy helped a little, and things improved more once I got to business school, but the symptoms didn’t go away entirely. Eventually, someone suggested getting my hormones checked. The test results were a shock but also comforting because they offered a solution. My testosterone levels had fallen to levels typical for a 70-year old man, and the doctor suggested I’d be a good candidate for testosterone replacement therapy. Desperate to feel better, I agreed. And in spite of my initial reservations, I’m glad I did. The depression is gone, my sex drive is back, making progress at the gym got easier, and my overall attitude became more assertive yet even-keeled.
Business school had already been a whirlwind experience, but it became even more so after I started the testosterone replacement. I’ve made a solid circle of close friends, dated a girl who could easily be a model, and learned a ton both in and outside of class. I’m still not the most gregarious guy in my class, but I’m hardly the awkward kid I was in undergrad. Of course, my self-improvement journey isn’t over. I’m looking forward to more traveling, new friendships, growing my career, dating new women, expanding my mind, and continuing to build my body. It’s been a great ride, but I’m just getting started. And I can’t wait to go on that journey with all of you.
