Step 3:
Become Thoroughly Acquainted with Your Own Insecurity and Self-Hatred.
Recently I heard
Noted Love Experts Jim Carrey and Mike Myers dispense the well-known
Love Tips that you have to love yourself before you can love anyone
else and you must be a whole and complete person before you can attract
the right type of person to yourself.
Hah! Well,
they are both comedians. What they actually mean by this is
that if you can profitably wallow in your own insecurity and self-hatred
for long enough eventually you will become so desperate that you'll
think anyone is Better Than You!
Oh no, wait, that's
not exactly what they meant. It's sorta what they meant, but really
they meant that if you can stand to say to yourself "Man, sometimes
I hate myself so much it's not even funny" and yet not kill yourself,
you will be primed for love. "Loving yourself" actually
means not killing yourself even when you are convinced there is objective
evidence that would argue in favor of it, which is an act of great
forgiveness and compassion in itself. And "being a whole and
complete person" means being a person capable of Withstanding
Great Agony. Because...Falling In Love is so intense that it is it's
own form of Great Agony (although a very wonderful form of Great Agony).
In other words, by hanging with your Insecurity and Self-Hatred, you
are exhibiting a willingness to accept someone you can Blame Your
Success On instead of feeling as though it's very important that you
be self-sufficient enough to escape or repress fear and self-loathing
altogether.
Truth is, Insecurity
and Self-Hatred make the love world go round, in fact, they are
what make falling in love such a wonderful and upsetting experience
in the first place. Ergo and hitherto, in order to fall in love correctly,
you will need to tap into your vast rich untapped stores of Insecurity
and Self-Hatred.
It is possible
that you are one of those people who is out of touch with his own
supplies of these precious and yet abundant natural resources. If
so, you will not fall in love until you get in touch with them, so
start drilling. Start by identifying a perceived personality flaw
you can criticize yourself viciously for.
Let's say, oh
just for fun, that your perceived Personality Flaw is an Over-Reliance
On Other People's Favorable Opinions of You as A Source of Self-Esteem
and Willingness to Continue Living. Put bluntly, you want people
to like you.
This is an excellent
trait, and I am now convinced that you are destined for overwhelming
success in life, and yet....this Personality Flaw, like all Personality
Flaws is a hideous and horrible secret or not so secret burden that
you must drag with you like a ball and chain of torture with you all
the days of your life as you are constantly slapped and stung by the
Merest Hint that Someone Does Not Like You, forcing you into an endless
round of conformity and Effort To Be Charming, Trying to Be Nice,
Flattering People You Do Not Really Like All That Much, While Punctuating
Your Sentences With Nervous Laughter and A Winning Smile. And so on
and so forth.
Of course your
problem could be something entirely different, but the point is that
you are currently alive and you have one. This problem, or a problem
like this, is your Key to Delirious Falling In Loveness And Ecstatic
Reproductive Success.
Because...as long
as you have a Personality Flaw, there can be someone Better Than You.
If your personality flaw is that you want people to like you then
all you need, essentially, is to clap your eyes upon a good-looking
woman Who Does Not Give a Fuck If Anyone Likes Her Ever. And when
you see this woman, your heart will start beating, your Sex Brain
will start churning out chemicals, your breath will stop breathing,
and you will know that you are in Serious Trouble.
Now do you see
why we had to have you practice looking for the things women do instead
of just how they look in terms of prettiness or hotness? Because it's
in the way a woman walks, looks around the room, eats all the hors'
d'oeuvres, or stares you down that tells you that she Does Not Give
a Fuck If Anyone Likes Her Ever. This is how you identify someone
who is hopelessly out of your league.
For why would
a woman who Does Not Give a Fuck If Anyone Likes Her Ever spend
even a microsecond looking at someone like you who cannot stop giving
a fuck about this very same thing. She wouldn't. She couldn't. You
are so far beneath her it's impossible to describe. And thus this
is the thing you want most in the entire world now and for all eternity.
You want this impossibly unreachable person to spend that microsecond
liking you, which she cannot do because why would she? It makes absolutely
no sense that she could even notice you. And yet, for your life to
continue, she must. Can you get a sense how sickening and thrilling
falling in love can be? If it makes sense, it's not falling in
love. If there are good reasons why this woman would be attracted
to you, it's not love. And yet, once it happens, you will be compelled
to go to desperate lengths to attract this person with the very same
hopeless Personality Flaw that ensures your doom.
Got it? Of course
you do. But I am going to engage in an example Disgusting Digression
just the same. Because it's been bothering me and I need to make other
people suffer too.
I saw Karl Rove
on TV once. Karl Rove was the long-time right hand guy to Bush 43.
The reason he was the long-time right hand guy for Bush 43 is that
he fell in love with the future president. This is a horrible and
disgusting thought and it brings many very disturbing visual images
to my mind which I will not share with you thankfully.
But it illustrates
the process. Karl Rove was Smart, and Fat, and Scared and Unpopular
and a Nerd. He saw young George W. Bush walk in the room and what
he saw was Stupid and Skinny and Arrogant and Rich and Cool. He saw
someone who didn't need to be smart. Who didn't need to be fat to
ease his feelings of being born hopelessly outside the privileged
class to which Karl Rove aspired in his adolescent Republican heart.
And so young Mr. Rove instantly fell in love. What, Karl Rove's heart
asked, would my life be like if for just one glorious moment I could
be Stupid and Skinny and Rich? What if I was not trapped in the body
of a Smart Fat Boring Person? How people would love me. How the rainbows
in the sky would shine more brightly, how the heavens would part and
rain blessings upon me. I would be redeemed at last, secure in the
loving arms of stupidity and skinny rich meanness. No longer would
I be tortured by intelligence and nerdy insignificance. I would be
accepted by God.
And so on and
so forth. Bush, meanwhile, saw a smart fat person and had the equivalent
reaction. What, Bush's heart thought, would my life be like if my
neurons would actually fire. What if I could understand things like
big English words? What if I knew what I was talking about just for
one glorious moment. What if the world was not a terrifying wall of
information I cannot comprehend? What if someone could like and admire
me, instead of disdaining me as an example of arrogance and incompetence
unbecoming my class status as a Rich Person? What if I could achieve
nerdy certainty and acceptance on my own merits, if I had any? What
heavenly sensations of warmth and light would I have access to if
I Only Had a Brain?
And so Karl Rove
became Bush's brain. And they carried on a sort of fuckfest and man-crush
of perverse proportions for decades. Thus is love.
Scary but real.
Now all you have to do is start hunting for someone who is neither
Karl Rove nor George W. Bush, someone whose massive Personality Flaw
will compensate for your own, match it, and make heaven open up to
you.
This is just plain
common sense. You are looking, and looking diligently, for someone
who should obviously hold your particular Personality Flaw in complete
contempt and yet who, because she does not have it, will be magically
drawn to it like a moth to flame or a bug to a bug-zapping light.
If you are funny to a fault, you are looking for someone who naturally
has no sense of humor. If you are shy, you are looking for someone
who nervously cannot stop being outgoing. If you are deep, then shallowness
is your ticket to heaven.
We could say,
oh well this is just opposites attract. Which it kinda sort is. But
not really.
Because what you
are unknowingly longing for is the Sensation of Longing. There
are plenty of people who are in some ways opposite to you that are
just irritating. They are irritating because their Personality Flaws
will not solve your problems. If you are neat and like being tidy,
then someone who is sloppy may be a good balance to your anal retentive
uptightness, but not necessarily someone who will be worth falling
in love with. Because you are fine with being neat and clean and well-groomed
and vain and all that shit that happens to be bundled together in
your particular personality. What you are not okay with is the gut-churning
anxiety that accompanies your every indecisive move no matter how
industriously and successfully you cover up your absolute terror of
making the wrong decision which you probably do all the time anyway.
So what you want in another person is what you long for in your own
life: Intimidating Decisiveness in All Matters Trivial and Significant.
So when you see
a woman walk in the room bossing everyone around with complete and
unwavering authority, your heart will sing. This is not the same thing
as wanting someone who will abuse you and treat you badly, although
a heart in serious Longing Mode may throw itself on the train tracks
of being Abused and Treated Badly in order to obtain Contrast Happiness
and Delicious Safety. But your dream OOYL woman may be just the opposite:
an Excessively Kind-hearted Puppy-Rescuer Who Could Not Be Mean
To Anyone. Because if your Self-Hatred centers around your inability
to stop worrying about achievement for even a second to rescue a puppy,
then spotting a Puppy-Rescuer may cause Longing To Ensue.
This is not a
rational process. This is a visual process. I truly
wasn't kidding when I harped upon the Big Eyes factor. I mean, if
you're blind then you'll need to use Big Ears or whatever. What I
mean is that your senses have been trained by billions of years of
evolution to be able to pick up far more information about a person's
soul than your rational mind can. The rational mind works slowly and
laboriously, constantly referring to What Everybody Else Thinks That
Is Totally Wrong But Still Important to Be Aware Of. Big frightened
or curious eyes on the other hand have no time for that tediousness
and cut right to the chase.
Occasionally your
big eyes will attempt to hook you up with someone who will make you
suffer like nobody's business; I've seen that happen. Which is why
experty-type experts will advise you to avoid Falling In Love altogether.
But they're still wrong. Because suffering like nobody's business
is exactly the kind of Extreme Emotion that the Heart inconveniently
craves to calibrate itself. You don't have to stay in love forever;
you just need to experience what it feels like. And it feels like
you have laid eyes on someone who is just inexplicably admirable in
a perverse and tender way with the most gloriously wonderful Personality
Flaws that you yourself could never hope to attain.
So what do you
do when your Sex Brain identifies someone whose own heart beats and
pulses with the Personality Flaws from heaven?
What you do
is trot out your own horrible Personality Flaws and display them like
a peacock showing its tail feathers. You desperately try to attract
the OOYL Better Than You Person by acting like a Hopeless Dork Who
Wants People to Like Him. Or by parading your Excessive Achievement
Focus. Or by displaying Intense Anxiety Over Every Little Decision.
Or by acting like a Super-Smart Nerd. Or by compulsively rattling
off Shallow Remarks that should offend the Deep and Soulful Object
of Your Attraction. Or by being unable to put a lid on your Cynical
Attitude Toward Life in front of the Tender-hearted Non-Cynical Person
You Long For.
You might think,
well, that's a stupid idea. I don't want to show the tail feathers
of my Personality Flaws to Someone Better Than Me! But, here's the
evolutionary deal with a peacock's tail feathers, which by the way,
do work in attracting the lady peacocks. Tail feathers are a useless
impediment to a peacock's life. They are a real pain the ass,
literally, ha ha! No seriously, they are incredibly inconvenient to
drag around, as you might guess if you've ever seen a peacock. When
a peacock shows his tail feathers, he is basically telling all the
female peacocks within eyeshot that he is such a stud that he can
continue to live, even though he has to drag around the useless burden
of a hefty clump of tail feathers. And the lady peacock's evolutionary
reproductive brain thinks to itself, 'what an apt metaphor for
life! So often it is full of unexpected burdens that a peacock must
have the fortitude and foolishness to withstand. I certainly wouldn't
want to invest my reproductive future in a peacock who didn't have
the peacockian cojones to display a lot of useless tail feathers that
indicate he is willing to soldier on in spite of overwhelming burdens.
Particularly since I myself hope to become just such a burden on one
lucky peacock in the near future!" Or something like
that.
To put it another
way, and this is truly not a joke--evolution has literally trained
many different species of all kinds to look for compatible members
of that species with Glaring and Inconveniently Useless Features.
In humans, this usually translates into Personality Flaws. I'm not
going to pretend that the Object of Your Longing is going to understand
why she is attracted to your own Useless Features, any more than I
am going to pretend that you will truly understand why you are attracted
to the Useless Features of the person you are falling in love with.
This happens subliminally and instinctively. But it happens. Exploit
the fact that it does.
Admittedly, this
will not always work. Life is unfortunately and always a game of probabilities.
And even when it does work, you are going to end up giving your big
eyes a real workout because it is simply terrifying. But it's the
terror that eventually pays off big time in Contrast Happiness. And
then you start becoming accidentally better-looking and so does she
and all of a sudden everyone can see you were made for each other.
Cuz you've got yourself a scaredy-cat who craves your bravery, while
you crave her sensible caution. You've latched on to the big-mouth
who craves your ability to listen. The Life of the Party who wishes
she could be quiet and still. The hysteric who longs for calmness.
The insecure about my intellect person whose Sex Brain makes goo-goo
eyes at your casual competence with astrophysics.
This is entirely
different from finding someone to go out with, someone to be in a
relationship with, someone who is nice, someone you can get along
with, someone you can tolerate, someone you can be irritated with
and fight with. This is different from finding someone who is a good
person. This is love.
How will you know
it's love?
You will know
because you will want to do things like say "I love you!"
Or sing. Or jump up in the air and scream YES! when the person
agrees to talk with you. It will feel like there is a lot at stake.
Chemicals will swirl around your body in a panic, trying to make you
presentable before an appearance in front of this person. If you are
normally quick to make a move, special jaw-clamping cells will go
quickly to work in the vicinity of your speaking muscles that will
prevent you from saying a word. If you are normally quiet and reserved,
desperate lunging cells will dart across the room and try to plant
themselves in front of the object of longing even though you have
no idea what to do once you get there. Impolite staring cells in your
eyes will make impolite spectacles of themselves. The entire energy
field of your body will rearrange itself to announce I AM FUCKED UP!
PAY ATTENTION TO MY DISARRANGED ENERGY FIELD! PLEEEEEEEASE!
People who have
never met you and everyone who actually knows you will realize that
you are hopelessly in love with whoever it is no matter how hard you
try to deny it. The only person who will not at first realize your
intense attraction is the OOYL person herself, who will be too distracted
by her Matching Personality Flaws to realize what is going on.
There is a song
in the musical South Pacific that illustrates the feeling fairly
well. In it the woman sings the haunting and yet entirely unoriginal
phrase "I"m in love, I'm in love, I'm in love..." many
times in a row. When your brain starts humming songs like this, you
will know it's love. Indeed the basic story line of this song illustrates
what we've been saying on this page. The story line is this: "I
used to be a big fat dork. Now I'm in love with someone wonderful."
And that's how
you will know it's love basically. When you used to be a big fat dork.
And now, improbably, you're not.
To recap: To
fall in love, simply look diligently with Wide Open Eyes at people
who are doing things Not Typically Considered Attractive such as stuffing
fried chicken into their faces until you find one who excites your
Sex Brain with strange yet compelling visual evidence of Out of Your
League Better Than Youness that promises to match in complementary
fashion the very Insecurities and Reasons for Self-Hatred that you
normally wish you didn't have in the first place. Proceed to display
your matching Personality Flaws in desperate yet colorful fashion,
keeping in mind the peacock metaphor, and then hope like hell the
Object of Your Attraction returns the favor and starts preening her
own insecurities until both of you are on a magic carpet ride that
makes you feel like singing songs from Broadway musicals of the 1950s
and dancing about in a gay yet endearing manner while wondering if
possibly this Experience of Emotional Extremes is going to be so intense
that it will cause your death.
That's about it.
And now, if you want to
waste more time, and who can blame you, since you're not actually
in love yet, you can click on a few completely random bonus FAQs about
Falling in Love and True Love and shit like that. In case you're interested....
prettyfedup.com