The Rawness

Sorry for the wait…

I’m sure you’ve noticed I’ve been M.I.A. lately.

Work and family demands have been keeping me busy. We’ll resume in mid-June.

Talk To Your Fucking Friends

This is one of the worst habits guys have. They go to a bar or club and stand side-by-side, elbow-to-elbow, and scan the room without talking to each other while holding drinks.

This conveys so many bad things. First, if you are friends with each other and even you don’t seem to find each other interesting enough to talk to, why should a stranger? Both of you automatically seem less intertesting. Second, it looks like you value meeting girls than each other. Loyalty to friends is an important aspect of female friendships, so they respect it when they see it in male friendships as well. Third, it looks like you depend on them to determine whether or not you had a good time or not while out. This is also an unattractive trait and looks like desperation. It gives the impression that the only reason you guys went out is in hopes of hooking up. Of course that’s true for 90% of the single guys who go out, but you don’t want your body language to scream such a thing either.

Talking to your friends with sincere and animated interest fixes many of these bad impressions. It shows you might be interesting people when you seem to really be caught up in talking to each other. You convey that you put your friends first. And it makes it look like you don’t base your whole self-worth on women and their attentions and don’t judge the quality of your night solely on whether or not you hooked up.

Better yet, talking to your friends is also a great way to scan the room without seeming like you’re scanning the room. You just face each other, talk, and use your peripheral vision and the view over your friend’s shoulder to gauge the quality of the room. Women are masters of this. They can seem totally engaged in conversation with friends while totally cataloguing and assessing the quality of a crowded room. This is the kind of social multitasking you need to master.

Don’t use self-deprecating humor except in rare occasions.

The only time self-deprecating humor is acceptable is either when it’s blatantly not true or when it’s obvious you’re a confident person and don’t really buy into what your saying on any level.

An example is a guy I knew who was musclebound and would occasionally make 98-lb weakling jokes. They would make people laugh, but they didn’t hurt him at all because you could just look at him and tell he didn’t really believe them. But another positive was that it was a subtle way to call attention to his physique without overtly bragging about it, so long as he didn’t do it very often.

Apologize for your actions, not your thoughts.

One time many years ago my friend Beethoven and I were at a bar. Beethoven approached a group of two girls on his own. His line was “So what are you guys gossiping about?” Worked like a charm.

After a few minutes of banter, one of the girls then asked Beethoven what we were gossiping about. Beethoven responded “We were just saying there are way too many fat chicks up in here.” The girl’s mouth just dropped in disgust.

“That’s not right at all,” she said. She looked angry.

Unfazed, Beethoven just responded “What do you care? It’s not like you’re fat or anything.” And he just kept on going. They ended up having a great conversation and exchanging numbers.

A lot of guys would have tried to apologize in some form the minute they were called out. “Oh, what I meant was…” or “I was just kidding…” or “I’m sorry, what I meant was…” Kiss of death. It’s a test and apologizing would have been a failure of that test.

If you spill your drink on a person or act in a bad manner toward them, you should definitely apologize. If you are cheating on your lover, you should definitely apologize. Those are actions. But thoughts you can’t help, and those shouldn’t be apologized for (although sometimes they shouldn’t be shared either). So while the man who sleeps with other women behind his woman’s back should apologize because he committed a wrong action, the man who merely finds other women attractive shouldn’t (so long as he’s tasteful about it) because it’s merely a thought he’s never intended to act upon.