The Way of the Selfless Lover
Here on Medium and elsewhere online, I’ve often come across the tropes that “Women prefer bad boys” and “Nice guys finish last”. These tropes are nothing new. I can remember them going back at least as far as the 1980s — long before social media and dating apps entered the picture. Let me state it unequivocally: there are genuinely nice guys who get overlooked by girls. I know, because I was one of them. Especially in high school, where I observed that several guys who were much less nice than me were more successful than me at attracting girls. However, I never came to the conclusion that girls wanted guys to be jerks. Not all of the guys at school with girlfriends were jerks; quite a few of them were (as far as I could tell) decent guys. And at least some of the jerks could put on the charm (when they wanted to) and possessed other qualities that girls found attractive. Was I frustrated that the girls who went for those guys couldn’t see (or chose to ignore) that they were not nice people? Absolutely. (Those guys had no incentive to be nice to me, so I got to see their true colors. Lucky me.) But at the end of the day, I knew that being a jerk wasn’t the answer.
My problem was that I didn’t see any attractive qualities in myself, other than being goodhearted.
Thankfully, my story eventually took a happy turn. It wasn’t until my second year of university, but I became a nice guy who could attract girls. (Not a lot of girls, mind you, but I was okay with that. Quality mattered to me more than quantity.) Since then, I’ve had wonderful relationships — and a lot of very hot sex — with some truly great women, the last of whom has been my wife now for more than 25 years. And my experiences have yielded insights that I think can help men today who walk in the shoes I once walked in.
To my fellow goodhearted men who yearn for a mutually fulfilling sexual relationship with a woman: please don’t blame women for not finding you attractive. Attraction can’t be forced, and there’s more to it than just being nice.
The issue may be that you’re getting in your own way.
If your overriding thought is to not be like men who are able to get women but then treat them like crap, then your mind might be identifying “able to get women” as a trait of bad men and thus something to be avoided. When that happens, you give off a vibe that tells women not to find you attractive. You might also not be feeling too good about yourself as a man, which is understandable if you’re accustomed to seeing bad men succeed where you fail. But not feeling good about yourself as a man simply isn’t a path to attracting women. You might appeal to a woman’s sympathy, but you almost certainly won’t appeal to her libido. Fortunately, I can tell you from firsthand experience that it is possible to find a way to feel good about yourself as a man without acting like a jerk.
Let’s start with some preliminaries that will help you stay on track:
(1) Know what kind of sexual relationship you want.
If you’re looking for love and not just sex, then you don’t need to have women throwing themselves at you left and right. It’s about the quality of the women you attract, not the quantity. In my life, there have been only a handful of women (that I know of) who saw me as relationship material. But that’s all I needed.
(2) Don’t just go for women who are superficially hot.
If you want a woman who can look past your less-than-ideal (by societal standards) looks, you need to be willing to do the same. (And don’t give me the argument that men are biologically hardwired to value looks more than women are.) The good news is that attraction can be slow-burning. As you get to know a woman through participation in a non-dating activity (a meetup or other social activity, volunteer work, a class you’re taking, etc.), it’s possible to start finding her more attractive than when you first met. This has happened to me countless times. I’ll meet a woman and not feel any attraction to her at first, but then as I get to know her better, I’ll suddenly realize she’s gorgeous and wonder to myself, “How did I not see it before?”
(3) Don’t buy into the thinking that women lose value as they age.
I’ve been married to the same woman for over 25 years now, and the sight of her naked still fills me with the desire to give her lots of orgasms. Again, if you understand what I said earlier about how attraction can take hold when you didn’t expect it to, you’ll be able to understand that older women can be sexy too. And let’s face it: in their twenties, a lot of women are immature, and their taste in men is overwhelmingly superficial. But as they accumulate life experience and wisdom, many women become more interested in goodhearted men (though again, it usually takes more than just being goodhearted).
(4) Don’t see women as the gatekeepers of sex and your own sexual fulfillment.
It’s not a woman’s job to relieve your urges. Sex is about people giving each other something that they can’t get just by masturbating on their own. It’s a mutual celebration of the fact that each of us is a soul living in a human body designed to give us exquisite pleasure.
…
With that, let me ask you a question that really gets to the heart of male attractiveness:
Do you have a healthy relationship with your libido?
Frankly, I don’t think most men do. The whole “boys will be boys” mentality doesn’t encourage us to do so. It encourages us to think of our libido as something wild & uncontrollable, and not to take responsibility for it. And that right there is, I think, a major distinction between men like us and the ones we aspire not to be like. The men who attract women while also simultaneously giving men a bad name embrace the opportunity not to be responsible. That’s how they’re able to come across as uninhibited in bed: they don’t care. We good men can’t give ourselves that option. Not in good conscience. But if we feel conflicted about our libidos, it’s going to be harder for us to give off vibes that the female libido picks up on. We end up inadvertently making it hard for women’s sexual radars to detect us. We understand that most women find leering, catcalling, and grabbing them by the privates without their consent unwelcome (to put it mildly), but we mistakenly think the problem is male lust, and so we try to tamp down on ours. That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Most straight & bi women actually hunger for male lust. To quote Elle Beau ❇︎ (from a piece she wrote here):
Most women desire being desired and crave the feeling of being sexually adored.
But of course, they also want to be seen and treated as fellow human beings, and that’s where we goodhearted men often get in our own way. Not because we shouldn’t see them and treat them as fellow human beings (We absolutely should, because they are!), but because we were never taught how to channel our lust in a way that supports that.
The story posted above chronicles my own journey to get my higher self and my libido to work together instead of against each other. Having accomplished this, I can tell you it’s a beautiful thing. Contrary to the mainstream view that men’s desire to see women naked is fundamentally selfish, I’ve found that isn’t actually the case — or at least it doesn’t have to be the case. Now that my higher self and libido are no longer in conflict, I realize that my desire to see women naked is an impulse to bring joy to a woman’s soul and make her feel comfortable in her own skin. Of course, I’m still driven to pursue my own sexual gratification; the difference is that I can do so in a way that doesn’t dehumanize women and also works out beautifully for both them and me. In addition, I’ve unlocked a kind of “lover energy” I never knew I had. It’s a selfless energy: it recognizes that a woman’s body is meant for her pleasure, not mine. It understands that the pleasure her body has to offer her is her birthright, and it’s very motivated to help her claim that birthright. And it doesn’t want to do anything with a woman that will make her feel uncomfortable. It considers both her body and mine sacred, and it sees doing something to a person’s body against their will as a desecration. On account of this energy, I actually enjoy the sexual chivalry of keeping my penis out of play at first so that I can savor the experience of pleasuring my lover in other ways.
Helping her claim her birthright brings me joy, which in turn makes me want to help her even more. It’s a sublime feedback loop that makes the macho “hit it & quit it” mentality look like a joke (a bad joke, at that). I want my lover to surrender to, and luxuriate in, the heat generated by my passion mixing with her pleasure.
But my lover energy isn’t just about being selfless. It also gives me the fortitude not to feel helpless in the face of feminine seductiveness. No matter how hot a woman is, if she thinks she can get me to cross a line I don’t want to cross by tempting me with offers of sex or seeing her naked — that’ll be a hard pass from me (no pun intended). That’s bad news for those women, but for the rest of womankind, it’s good news:
I can always talk to and relate to a woman as a fellow human being, no matter how attractive I find her or how much skin she’s revealing.
Unlocking this lover energy inside me was a game changer. I was no longer just a goodhearted man; I was a selfless lover. I knew I had something to offer women sexually. Something that would give a woman good reason to get naked with me, because it would be a beautiful experience for her.
Now, I don’t want to give you the impression that this one change was all that I needed to change my romantic fortunes. It wasn’t. There was other work I had to do too, and I’ll go into that in Part 2:
But there’s no doubt that getting my libido and my higher self on the same page and unlocking my lover energy played a vital role.
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
From The Good Men Project on Medium
What Does Being in Love and Loving Someone Really Mean? | My 9-Year-Old Accidentally Explained Why His Mom Divorced Me | The One Thing Men Want More Than Sex | The Internal Struggle Men Battle in Silence |
***
Join The Good Men Project as a Premium Member today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
A $50 annual membership gives you an all access pass. You can be a part of every call, group, class and community.
A $25 annual membership gives you access to one class, one Social Interest group and our online communities.
A $12 annual membership gives you access to our Friday calls with the publisher, our online community.
Register New Account
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—–
Photo credit: Alexandru Zdrobău on Unsplash