[Angel Donovan]: Today’s question is from Richard, who’s 37 years old. His question is a little bit long, but I want to give you the full context, so here it is.
“I’m a pretty intellectual guy and it takes me a while to figure out whether I like a girl or not. If you took me to a bar or social event, it would take me quite a bit of looking around to find the 5% or so of girls that I find attractive. I can’t really relate to the guys who feel instant attraction to any cute girl they see; I’ve always been like this, observing girls for a while, slowly developing attraction and having almost no interest in 90% of women.
Do you have any tips for developing a greater awareness of your own feelings of sexual attraction and enacting on feelings that are perhaps subtle and incomplete at first? This would help me and the minority of guys who share this tendency.”
Another related question is this: “As I try to pursue my incomplete attraction, I find that I often lose interest in a girl just as we’re starting to know each other. I just get totally bored and want out.
So instead of getting rejected by girls, I’m usually doing the rejecting myself and girls are left a bit confused. No dating advice seems to address this issue; it almost always assumes that a.) The guy has an absolute, unwavering interest in the girl from start to finish and/or b.) it’s always the girl doing the rejecting.
I suspect the answers to these questions is that I need to further develop my awareness of my basic sexual attraction to women and also adapt a dating advice to my own personality. However, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the subject.”
Thank you for the question, Richard. That’s a great question. We have had similar questions in the past. It’s probably a minority, but there are a bunch of guys who have very similar questions and kind of point to this.
The first part is, well, Jackson’s here with us today as well. I didn’t tell you guys, he’s listening quietly in the background. Hey, Jackson!
[Jackson Hunter]: Hey, Angel! Hey, guys!
[Angel Donovan]: Alright, man. We’ve actually been talking before so he’s likewise dived into this, but he’s here and he’s going to be helping answer these questions of course. Jackson sometimes has a different perspective from me, which is all good, so hopefully we’ll give you a bit of a mix of perspectives on this.
Have you got anything to say on these question and answer sessions, these mini episodes, Jackson?
[Jackson Hunter]: No, I’m really looking forward to this. It’s great to hear the questions from our readers, so keep sending them in, guys.
[Angel Donovan]: Yup. It’s a lot of fun to answer these. I’ll kick off the answer to this.
The first point is, look at your libido, your testosterone levels. I will put this as, there’s an 80% chance this is what’s going on, and you could’ve had a lower libido, a lower testosterone than most guys throughout your whole life. And for guys over 37, it can get slightly worse. As we age, we lose testosterone.
This is extremely common today. To give you an idea, in the Academy – the Dating Skills Academy – about 80% of guys, we ask them to get tested because we think it’s a specific issue related to their inner game and confidence and so on and just being masculine and sexual in general.
Every single one has come back low. Right, Jackson? I don’t think there’s anyone who’s come back over 400. Have you seen anyone come back higher than that?
[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah. There was a guy who came back at about 500, but he actually works in a health club, so he’s doing a lot of exercise already, and he probably had the highest level as everyone else was under that, so it is a big issue for these guys.
[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. To give you context to that, we’re talking about total testosterone right there, so when you measure total testosterone, a good level would be 800 or 1,000. I think 1,000 is a really good standard to have. Have you got any perspective on that, Jackson?
[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, I think up to about 1,200 is sort of up around the max. There’s levels you can look at depending on what your age is. I think for our age – we’re in our 30s – around 600 is sort of the bottom of where you want to be, so 800 is probably optimal and then up towards a thousand is ideal. That’s definitely where you want to aim to get towards.
[Angel Donovan]: So this is definitely, Richard, the first thing you want to get to. You want to go and get yourself tested for total testosterone and free testosterone to be sure, and then you can just eliminate this. It’s pretty amazing what it can do to your health as well, but also just how you feel every day – your drive, your motivation.
Libido is tied to motivation. It would also improve your sex life with any woman that you do get with in relationships and so on, so it’s pretty important.
What I tend to do personally, and Jackson can tell us what he does, is I tend to get tested every six month just to make sure I’m in the ballpark. I pretty much know what to do now that I can tweak it.
Sometimes I get distracted by life, or I’ll get more stress and all other stuff into my life and maybe it will drop a little bit lower, but I tend to bounce around between 800 and 1,050 – somewhere around there. I try to keep it closer to a thousand and 800.
Jackson, do you have a different approach to it?
[Jackson Hunter]: No, I do the same. I’ve had mine tested a few months ago, it was around about 800. Even though I haven’t been doing as much working out and lifting weights as I had been, so that will be responsible for part of the drop-off.
I think every six months is probably a good ballpark to aim for.
[Angel Donovan]: Yup, absolutely. Okay, so how do you get yourself tested?
Like I said, if you want to do this budget-wise, you can just go for total testosterone and that will give you a ballpark figure. Sometimes, free testosterone can be pretty important because different biological processes going on in your body can mean that you may have “okay” total testosterone, but your free testosterone is too low, and the free testosterone is the important stuff because that’s what are available and creates the signals in your body to things that are important.
The first thing you need to know when you get into testing is that there are two types of tests on the market, and the one you want is called LCMS Methodology, just because it’s more accurate. If you’re going to do this, you might as well do it properly so you get the right –. The worst thing you can get is a false answer, which basically says you’re okay when you’re not. You don’t really want to do that.
This is Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry and you can get a total testosterone plus free testosterone test bundle for about $120 if you go direct through one of the labs. You can go for direct in the US, for example, or maybe get it covered by insurance. If you go through a doctor, you can do that sometimes.
If you just want to get total testosterone, you can get this for about $60-65. You don’t have to do this every six months, but you definitely should get this spot checked if you’ve got similar questions to Richard, or you’re just not motivated and confident in general.
We’ll put in the show notes some relative labs with these kinds of prices because there are some that charge more and so on, but there are some pretty good ones that I’ve used in the past.
In terms of total testosterone, just so yo make this clear, the total testosterone is going to be measured in nanograms/deciliters, so the 800 and 1,200 parameter we were talking about were in nanograms/deciliters.
Sometimes in other countries, you’ll get other measures, so you have to translate back if that’s the case. Or maybe if you go to a specific lab, they might give you something different, but it’s normally those, so just make sure you’re testing in nanograms/deciliter – ng/dL.
The other thing to understand is some testosterone which are bound go SHBG – sex hormone binding globulin. This is the stuff that is really tightly bind and won’t be bioavailable. When you’re doing the free testosterone, they’re going to take that out.
Different tests show you different things, so I’m explaining this in case they tell you some of these things in the result.
The other one, there’s also testosterone bound to albumin, which is weakly bound, and it can often be converted to free testosterone and be made bioavailable. They tend to put that in the free testosterone count, so basically you have everything except that which is bound by sex hormone binding globulin, which is the stuff you really can’t get at and use.
The measurement for free testosterone is in picograms/milliliter, so it’s a bit different. In that area, you should be aiming for 14 picograms/milliliter – somewhere around there. At least 12, which is the average for young males – 20, 30, 35-year-olds.
You don’t want to be looking at the lab reference ranges because they’re pretty off. Basically the whole population has low testosterone these days in men just because of modern lifestyles and everything like that. You’ll often find that when they’re looking at averages of 400 – something around here – which is definitely too low, so that’s not where you want to be.
We discussed a lot of testosterone in one of the past episodes, which was with Christopher Walker, and that was in episode 52. If you want to learn more about testosterone and how to build it and all of that kind of stuff, you can go back and check out that podcast episode.
Jackson, anything else to add on the testosterone/libido issue?
[Jackson Hunter]: No, not really. That podcast you did with Christopher Walker I think was one of the better ones we’ve done, so I’d encourage guys to go and check it out. We go into a lot more depth there and pretty much answer all of our questions. Go check that one out, definitely.
[Angel Donovan]: Yeah. And Christopher’s got a very unique background because of biological difficulties he had to overcome for having a tumor in his brain. So you can imagine, anyway, there’s parts of your brain are responsible for programming your body to create testosterone, so he’s had to do it in very difficult conditions, which I think is a great point for someone to come and give that advice because they’ve had to do it in a much harder condition than you’re going to be coming out in that problem. It was an interesting interview.
The number two point I wanted to discuss is that it’s actually okay to only be attracted to 90% of women – that’s fine. I would definitely say that I’m only attracted to 10% or 5% or less these days. I don’t know about Jackson. How do you feel about this? Is it okay to not be attracted to 90% of women?
[Jackson Hunter]: I think it depends on the way you live. Richard didn’t tell us where about he is. I imagine if I was in certain cities in the United States, I might only feel attracted to 5% of the women.
I happen to live in a city at the moment where I would say probably 50% of the women I see are fine and very attractive; it just happens to be a city where there’s a lot of great, fit, healthy, body-conscious women, so I can’t really relate to that – only being attracted to 5% of women.
I’ve definitely seen some places and women from certain cities and I think, yeah, if I lived there, I’d probably struggle to meet women that I found attractive. So it depends on where you are as well, I think.
[Angel Donovan]: Absolutely. There are some places I’ve visited which I’ve basically struck off because I decided not to date anymore. Maybe that’s just because the types of women don’t fit me also, and there’s a variety of reasons.
I’ve lived in third-world countries where – we’re going to talk about this in a second. There are other reasons like intellectual fit and so on, which can relevant.
Anyway, what I want to say on this point also, in addition to what Jackson said, is you should make sure that you own it. What I mean by that is that you need to own your sexual expression.
I’m a bit concerned about a lot of guys getting bombarded by media impressions of what girls should be, of what they should look like, when we all know that it’s all Photoshop work. They’ve all basically created these false identities of women and what they look like and so on, and you’re getting these false expectations of what you should be attracted to.
It’s all very subtle, but this is going on every day, potentially. You might be getting these programs by media and society for what you should like.
What I mean by “make sure you own it” is get in touch with yourself and don’t be inhibited about what you enjoy and like to be attracted to with women. Don’t feel any social pressure about what you like and you’re attracted to in women because we’re talking about your satisfaction here; it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. At the end of the day, this is going to be down to you to be satisfied with this. So you’ve got to own what you’re attracted to and what you’re not, and explore it.
In one of the episodes, we spoke to Reid Mihalko and this was also all about owning your sexual expression and your sexuality and learning about what works for you. That was episode 58; you should definitely check that out to learn more about that. it’s really important because I think a lot of guys today just go with the flow and go with what everyone else tells them they should be attracted to, and they don’t explore it for themselves.
I can tell you, I have a lot of inhibitions way back in the year 2000. Actually, when Jackson and I were first hanging out in the early 2000s, who was I mostly interested in those days, man?
[Jackson Hunter]: I think you were only interested in Asian girls back in those days [chuckling]. I don’t think I ever saw you talk to a white girl.
[Angel Donovan]: Right, so I went through this little period where basically what happened was I started travelling and I came back to London, and then that’s where I met Jackson. At that point in my life, I met an Asian girl and at first I wasn’t used to Asian girls, I wasn’t attracted to them, but then I met this very, very attractive Japanese girl, dated her for a while and it was a great relationship.
After that, for a while I wasn’t interested in anything except Asian women, and that was a part of my exploration. That’s not where I am today, but it was a part of my exploration of my sexual interests and so on. Now I’m more balanced.
But I think you do kind of go through phases and areas where it’s uncomfortable. When I first approached that Japanese girl, I wasn’t that interested in Asian girls, but she was a bit more attractive than most and that’s how I got to learn more about Asian women and took more of an interest and understood how attractive Asian women can be, in general.
Another bit to this is just satisfaction. It’s what I call the “Hundred-year Question.” This is something I learned from business school.
I went to one of the top business schools in the world and this is probably one of the most valuable parts of the program. The first day when we went in there, they told us to write an essay on what we wanted at the end of our program.
We’re in one of the top business schools in the world and we’ve obviously all gone there from management, consulting, investment banking and all these kind of jobs, so you can imagine we all wanted the top job in x company, x, y, z. It was all pretty bland in terms of what we wanted at the end of our course.
We wrote these essays and just ran off [check 14:34]. Next couple of days later, the guy’s like, “Okay, now we’re going to write 15 years out – where are you going to be in your life? What’s the perfect situation?” So we brought those essays back.
Then the last essay was the most interesting one. This was where he said, “Okay, this is the essay that’s written by someone else when you’ve died – so your best friend, your eulogy, whatever it is. And they’re going to talk about what it was that was great about your life from their perspective.”
We found that we wrote completely different essays when we wrote from that perspective. I call it the “Hundred-year Question” because I want to live up to a hundred.
If you think that you’re a hundred years old and you’re looking back on your life. Maybe you haven’t got much longer to go. What would you like your life to be like? That puts everything in perspective. That tells you what’s really important to you.
When it comes to your sexual life, your dating life, your lifestyle – this is a really important part of our satisfaction, so you should go for this exercise as well and think back over your life. Consider what kinds of relationships you would want, what would you regret not having explored – because we’re talking about a bit of exploration here, in terms of Asian women or whatever different types of women you’re not comfortable with, because you didn’t grow up around them or whatever reason.
I think everyone should go out there and explore a bit more, and then you can understand yourself a bit better – what you like, what you don’t like. If you’ve always dated the same type of girl, then you’re probably not going to be interested in a lot of girls due to comfort reasons. You’re basically restricting yourself because of your comfort zone. So that's what I call the end goal.
Have you got anything more to say on this part, Jackson?
[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and I think it’s something that most guys don’t do. I’d say probably most guys that I know, they have a type in mind of the type of women that they want to go out with and what they think they’re attracted to.
I think it pays dividends to really be open-minded and adventurous in meeting different types of women and just exploring your own sexuality and finding out what you really like.
One thing that I remember is when we used to do boot camps back in London, we’d often have guys come along on the boot camp and I would ask them, “What type of women are you attracted to? What type of women are you hoping to meet?”
They would give me a very specific idea, they would say, “I want to meet a tall, brunette woman, maybe Italian with long, black hair.” And I would push them to approach different types of women.
I would say, “What about that woman over there?” “I don’t want to talk to her; she’s only a five.” This is if guys rate women out of ten, which we don’t really subscribe to that theory.
They would say, “She’s a 5 out of 10 attractiveness for me.” “Well just go and talk to her anyway and just go and find out what she’s like.” Once they actually went over and talked to her and spent a bit of time interacting with her, getting to know her, often they might be talking to her for an hour. They come away with her phone number.
I’ll ask them, “How did it go?” “It went really well.” I said, “So she’s a 5 out of 10?” “No, she was an 8 out of 10.” Once they actually got to know her and gives himself the chance to get attracted to her and notice different things about her, they would rationalize afterwards that there were all these different things about her that they found attractive, but just looking at her from a superficial point of view without getting to know her, they'd make all these judgments about here.
This is something a lot of guys do and you miss out on so many opportunities by doing this. Obviously there’s going to be some women that you’re never going to be attracted to, and I’m not saying the woman that you find hideous-looking, that you should go and talk to her because maybe you would find her attractive.
But maybe you have an idea in your mind that you only want women with big breasts and that’s all you’re attracted to, but there might be other girls who you could find physically attractive if you just give yourself a chance to go and talk to them and get to know them.
For me, I’ve been traveling a lot as Angel has, and one of the things we do is we meet women from a lot of different countries and different accents and different cultures and different backgrounds and lifestyles. It’s actually really fun and interesting to get to know some of these women and just experience what they are, because they’re very different from the women you would meet in your own country. When you start doing this, you find the different things about women that you’d be attracted to that you wouldn’t have noticed beforehand. This is where attraction goes beyond the superficial level.
There might be something about a woman that you think, “Oh, I love the way that the woman did this,” and it’s not something that you would’ve ever really noticed until you experienced it. There’s too many guys that just don’t take chances; they don’t put themselves in a new position and go out and meet new people. They just rely on what they think they like.
They get some past experiences, like a girlfriend they’ve had in the past, or very commonly, watching porn. I think a lot of guys watching too much porn online, and this affects the type of women that I think that they’re attracted to, which very unlikely they’re going to meet that in real life.
I think we got a podcast on porn as well, so you can put that up in the show notes. If you find you’ve got a problem with watching too much porn online, go check out this podcast that Angel did where he talks about one of the problems with porn addiction and how it can affect your sex life. I think that’s something that’s worth checking out as well.
Just the overall thing I think is your outlook on life is you want to take chances in everything you do and open yourself up to new possibilities, and that includes meeting different types of women, talking to different types of women and really finding out what you like.
I think if you start doing that, you’d be surprised at the types of women you might find yourself becoming attracted to. Angel.
[Angel Donovan]: Absolutely! Just to reference that podcast Jackson just brought up, it was episode 40 with Gary Wilson and we talked about all the problems related to porn and our abuse of it. The guy’s an academic so it was a pretty interesting episode there.
One of the things Jackson was talking about was basically being open and approaching people, taking in a curiosity in them. There’s another guy who brought that up and termed it in a really great way. It was way back in episode 4, which was Rob Judge.
A lot of guys have this excuse, “She doesn’t look attractive, she doesn’t look interesting,” and Rob Judge was like, “Well, find out. Go find out the truth of who she is.” You’ll often see, as Jackson pointed out, that she’s much more interesting; she’s got all this things to her life that you didn’t think of when you were just seeing her in the club or whatever.
You have to be curious about this and explore and get out of your comfort zone. Overall, just be curious in your mindset and open-minded, and you’ll find that you’re taking an interest in a lot more women that way, I think. So that’s something you have to be careful about. Curiosity, a healthy, open mindset and also exploring novelty a bit.
Both Jackson and I have explored lots of different places while traveling, but also different lifestyles. You’ve seen in the last episode, episode 80, recently I explored orgasmic meditation, which basically involves going hanging out with different women and doing orgasmic meditation, so it’s like swinging in some respects, in terms of what you’re doing, because you’re with lots of different women.
I was actually doing orgasmic meditation with women I wouldn’t have called the caricature person I was attracted to, but all of those experiences were interesting in terms of doing that. I know that’s not for everyone, but I’m just saying that it opens your mind up to places, and that might be something worth looking at as well if you want to expand your understanding in that area.
Going back. I wanted to do a bit of a “how to own it,” like own your sexuality, develop your self-awareness in this point of view. I just want to give you a few tips on that.
First of all, you have to get a fair amount of sexual and relationship experience. I don’t know how much experience you have, Richard, but say you’ve had three girlfriends and slept with five women in your life – I’m not saying at all that’s the situation, but that’s not a lot of experience. That doesn’t give you a lot to understand yourself from. You have to be mindful of that.
Some relationships, they can be really deep in terms of sexuality and everything, and you can really learn a lot. You can have two relationships in your life, but they could be extremely deep and you could have explored both of your sexualities and your intimacy and everything, so you could really understand a lot about yourself. But it’s unusual for most people to have really deep relationships with a variety of experiences. That’s something that I think is really important for understanding your self-awareness.
Be aware if you haven’t had a lot of experience yet, it’s something you should probably expand if you want to understand your own sexuality. Do you have anything to say on that point, Jackson?
[Jackson Hunter]: I think it’s important in one aspect in that guys who are very intellectual such as Richard, when they don’t have a lot of sexual experience, when they do have sex, it tends to cause a bit of anxiety and it causes them to be in their head a lot throughout the experience.
I think that until you have a lot of experience and it just becomes more commonplace where you have sex with different girls, it’s not until you get to that stage where you can get out of your own head and just be in the moment more and just enjoy the experience for what it is without thinking about it too much.
I know that this is a big issue for a lot of guys. When I first got into this many years ago, this was something I even dealt with myself. Your mind is just chattering away and you’re coming up with different things that you’re worrying about, and it can cause a bit of stress and anxiety.
Sometimes guys can even avoid sexual situations because they don’t want to deal with that cause of stress, the cause of anxiety, in the same way that guys who suffer from approach anxiety will often avoid approaching women so they don’t have to confront the issue.
Guys who have a bit of sexual anxiety who end up in their own head too much, they can avoid sexual situations because they don’t want to have to deal with it so they just run away from the situation. I think it’s really important to just build up your sexual experience to the point where it just becomes such a commonplace event that you can be a lot more in your body. You can be noticing your feelings, what you’re feeling in your body, noticing what the woman is feeling in her body and you’re just really connected to the woman and enjoying the experience, which is how sex should be. You shouldn’t be thinking logically when you’re in it, but for guys who are very intellectual, this is almost always what they do.
I think the only key for it really is just to build up your sexual experience. I get the feeling that this is probably something that Richard deals with, just from the way he’s written his letter. It sounds like he probably is having a lot of anxiety when he’s having sex with women. He will be thinking about it too much.
I would say that one of the best things that guys can do if they don’t have the experience is find a girl they’re at least reasonably attracted to and just try and make her a regular sex partner. Really try and sleep with the same woman at least once a week or once a fortnight at the bare minimum, and just really find out what you like sexually and what women like sexually and focus on communicating, enjoying the experience, having fun and just getting out of your head and into your body, and just noticing your emotions and your feelings and everything that you’re experiencing in that moment.
I think when you do that, it would help with all of the other issues that you’re dealing with as well.
[Angel Donovan]: Yup, absolutely. And I think for some guys, if you haven’t had a relationship, you haven’t had that safe environment – because if you’re always casually hooking up with girls, it’s a little bit superficial, then the relationship’s never necessarily developed.
I’m not saying that’s always the case, because you can have a casual kind of thing which is actually pretty intimate and great, but I think the standard is it’s a bit more superficial for most people.
It’s probably good if you’ve had at least one experience where you’re in a relationship for a while; it’s a safe environment to develop your sexuality and learn and become really intimate and share yourself with a girl and connect on that level. If you haven’t had that kind of experience before, that might be something that’s been lacking in terms of your experience.
Another thing I was thinking of, one that has been very useful for me, is meditation, mindfulness – just forgetting, more awareness of yourself, in general. Like Jackson was talking about, feelings, how you feel, how she feels. Mindfulness allows you to understand what’s going on and notice more things about what’s going on with your body and outside with other people and so on. That can be really helpful.
Another thing which I’ve done but may not be great for everyone, but I think a lot of people find this pretty helpful, is using psychedelics. Magic mushrooms – I personally had some great experiences there, I felt like it opened me up and made me more connected with my sexuality and other aspects of me.
A lot of people do ayahuasca these days – it’s really big in LA, where I just was. A lot of people have been doing that; there’s even a podcast on this. There’s a podcast called Reset.me which talks a lot about the experiences of ayahuasca, and that's another road you can go if you feel like that’s the way you want to develop yourself. It’s a tool, basically. There’s also tools to learning how to own your own sexuality.
The biggest thing is just to live more – get out there and engage with life freely, openly. This is your one chance at it, so go out there and explore life. The more you challenge yourself, you push yourself out of your comfort zone, the more you’ll understand yourself because it’s the way you respond to the world, the way you respond to the challenges. That teaches you a lot about yourself as well in all sorts of levels. These things tie up at the end of the day and work down to the bottom level.
Okay. Next topic is, “How valuable is sex to you?” This connects back to your testosterone and libido, right? If you got low testosterone and low libido, you actually find that you value sex less because you’re not as driven biologically to have sex.
Some men who have a lot of experience, a lot of guys I speak to have a lot of experience; they would downgrade how much we value sex these days because we’ve had a lot of it and we’re not as willing to put up a lot of effort as maybe because we're not in our 20s or early 30s.
I used to go out clubbing a lot with Jackson 15 years back. We were sometimes going out clubbing every single night, having fun, having lots of sex and I’m just not interested in that kind of lifestyle anymore. I think there’s many different aspects to that, but that's going to be part of your motivation and interest in women is going to be how valuable you see sex as right now.
If you understand that, you understand the context for it as well. What does sex mean to you? This is like a bit of a negative point. Does it relate to your ego?
One of the reasons I say it’s okay not to be attracted to 90% of women is because for a lot of guys I feel like their ego is wrapped up in them having to have sex, having to hook up, rather than actually be genuinely interested in the girl, and I don’t think that’s really healthy, long-term.
If you’re feeling judged because your score is too low, how many you’ve slept with, or that you feel like you’re judging your own value based on how many women you’ve slept with – that’s not what I call a good motivation for going out and meeting women and being attracted to them.
Sometimes when you compare yourself to other guys, it’s because they value sex more, whether it’s for biological reasons or because of their life experience, or because they’ve got their ego tied up in it as well. There’s that aspect to it, which is a bit different.
I think, over time, as you get more experience, you get a lot more picky and it becomes a lot more on a deeper level, which could be an intellectual level or something else, which I was pointing to, so that’s a different context. If you have had a lot of experience and you really know what you want, then I think that’s when you start pulling back and maybe you’re only interested in the 5% of women because you know what’s going to click with you and you know it will create a really great experience and satisfaction for you.
[Jackson Hunter]: Yeah, definitely. Like what you were talking about, when you are in your 20s, I think the motivation for sex can be really different from when you get into your 30s and beyond.
A lot of guys who do go out to bars and clubs, I think their main motivation for sex is often impressing their mates, impressing their friends and being able to brag about the girl that they hooked up with or took home or whatever. That’s not a healthy thing, long-term.
If you are young, you tend to be a bit more immature and you do some of these things and probably everybody goes through this stage at some point. I don’t think it’s like a bad thing to go through that, but it’s like a learning experience and you sort of come out the other end and you see sex as just sex. It’s not a big deal when you get to the stage where you have the skills where you can meet and attract women; you know you can go out and you can have sex when you want to, so it’s not like a messy thing in your life.
But when you’re also doing some of the things we’re talking about, your testosterone is optimized, when you’re not addicted to porn and watching that a few times a week, when you’re eating really well and lifting weights and getting plenty of sleep and having a healthy lifestyle, you should have a healthy sex drive in your thirties. If you don’t feel that kind of sex drive at all, then you definitely want to get the testosterone checked out.
But I think when you’ve built that sex drive, like for me, I still feel like I have a very strong sex drive, so that’s my motivation to go out and find attractive women that I like, that I want to have sex with. If you don’t feel that at all, then you need to look at some of these things that we’re talking about.
One of the things that I would say is, what is it about sex that really turns you on? What is it about women that really turns you on? Because it sounds like you’re sort of stuck in your head where you want to connect with women intellectually, which is great. I mean, I really enjoy connecting with women intellectually and going out, having dates with them where we would go out and have a few drinks or coffee or whatever and we’ll talk for a few hours about all the different things about life and our experiences. That can be a really amazing time.
At the same time, I can also really appreciate and enjoy women who have a very strong feminine energy who I’m very attracted to sexually, but I don’t necessarily have that intellectual connection with.
And there are women that I’m not going to have a long-term relationship with, and then have someone that I might have in my life long-term. If it was just a short fling, like a holiday romance or a one-night stand, if that kind of thing happens and comes up, then there’s no reason to deny that just because there’s nothing there long-term; there’s no intellectual connection.
As men, we have to accept there’s certain things about women that we’re really turned on by and we’re attracted to different parts of their body, different things that they do, the way that they move, the way they look at you, the way that they’re dressed. All these things, they can be very specific to you.
The fact that you’re talking to some of these women, I assume that you have some attraction to them when you’re first talking to them, but it sounds like as you talk to them, meaning your standard’s intellectually, so that’s killing your attraction. One thing you can do about that, if it’s a problem – you’re not going to find a lot of women who probably are going to be as intellectual as you, on the same level as you.
If you want to have more options, if you want to have more dates, more sex, you’re going to have to look for different things that you can be attracted to in women and maybe you can say to yourself, “This woman isn’t going to be a good long-term option for me.” This is something that you haven’t said in your letter.
If you’re looking for a girlfriend specifically, or if you’re just looking for a girl that you can have a one-night stand with or just have a casual relationship with –. I know guys who may be in a similar situation with you. One thing that they will do is they will have women who they feel satisfied by intellectually who may be just friends with them, and they’ll be out with these women once a week, twice a week, go out to dinner, get out for drinks, and just hang out with them as friends.
That sort of satisfies their intellectual need, but then they’ll maybe have other women who satisfy their sexual needs and their attractive, more feminine – whatever it is about them that the guy is attracted to.
They’re kind of compromising in that way in saying, “Okay, it’s going to be very difficult to find a woman who has everything” and that doesn’t mean that you should settle for less than what you look for and that you shouldn’t look for women who has everything, but in the meantime, I think it doesn’t hurt to focus on looking for different aspects of women that you can be attracted by.
That might mean saying for the next couple of months as an experiment. Lower your standards just a little bit for how intelligent a woman has to be for you to be attracted to her.
Maybe go out with a mindset of “not every woman is going to be on the same level as me intellectually, but I’m going to accept that and I’m going to just focus on finding other things about this woman, discovering certain things about her, her personality, that I can be attracted to and maybe give a chance for that sexual attraction to develop.”
If you’re only talking to these women in the same way, it sounds like you’re only talking to them for maybe less than an hour or so. I think you’re not giving yourself a long time to really find things about them that you can really appreciate and become attracted to them.
It sounds almost like you’re looking for things to disqualify them on so that if they maybe say something that you don’t agree with or they’ll say something that shows they’re not up to the same level as you, “Okay, that’s it. I’m crossing her off the list, like she’s not good enough.”
I just wonder if this is going to become a habit and a pattern where no woman is ever good enough for you and you’re looking for excuses to avoid taking action and putting yourself in uncomfortable situations.
For guys who don’t have a great deal of experience, is this something that they all often do? I would encourage sort of like an experiment just for a month or a couple of months – lower your standards a little bit and just spend a little bit more time getting to know a woman and just focusing on learning about her and being curious about her, like what Angel was talking about before.
Just find out different things about her, really take some time to think what is it about women that turn you on, that can satisfy you sexually, that doesn’t have anything to do with her intelligence, anything to do with her mind?
It could be her body, her personality, her energy – all of these different things. That's just something that I think is worth putting some time into as well. Angel.
[Angel Donovan]: Absolutely. Energy is a huge thing, I would say – beyond intellectual. I think what’s happened in society is we’re really trained these days to focus on intellectual – the IQ, the intellectual endeavors.
If you think about the whole education system, the fact that we’re always in front of screens and reading, the Internet and all of this – we’re really trained to consume and use information all the time, but it’s not all of life.
A guy whose work we recommend is David Deida. You know some of his courses and books, like The Way of the Superior Man. He talks a lot about the energy, for instance – female and masculine energy. This is a really big thing; it’s pretty profound when you meet someone of a very opposite energy to you.
A girl is a lot more playful, a lot more feminine energy; not necessarily intellectual at all. It could be completely different for you, but you will find yourself attracted on a different level if you allow that to happen.
That's something I always wanted to bring up is study this as well, of course. Study sexuality, study relationships. A lot of guys don’t do that; they’re all focused on meeting women, attracting women. Particularly, in your case, if you feel like you’re not interested in enough women, then study sexuality, learn more about it. Learn about the different dimensions of it and of course check out some of the podcasts we’ve spoken about this kind of stuff.
Number one was episode 75 with Glenn Geher, who is a PhD academic in this area. Episode 67, we actually talked about intelligence and how it’s attractive and where it’s not so relevant and so on, so that’s directly relevant to this. Also Geoffrey Miller, who’s of course the author of The Mating Mind. I forget which episode that was. Just go to datingskillsreview.com and in the search box you select the podcast and you can put Geoffrey Miller in there or Miller, and it will pop up with the search results with his podcast – if you’re lazy, like most people.
The other thing I just wanted to say also is if you’re in an IT job or a job where you’re looking at screens all the time, I think it’s also a bit of a habit to focus some information and be less social and be less aware of the social dimensions, the personalities, the energies and the other bits to a relationship. I also think you have to think about the context of relationships as well.
I was just dating a Brazilian girl when I was in LA – completely different to me, not intellectually-driven at all, but an amazing, feminine, playful energy. She was always playing and also chatty – completely different to me, especially after, if for instance I’d been working for a full day, the last thing I want to do is have an intellectual conversation. I want to chill.
I want to have some fun; I want to flip on to the other side of my personality and enjoy myself and so on. It can really fit your lifestyle at different points of life.
Like Jackson was saying, sometimes if it’s for casual relationships or maybe it’s a better balance to your life to maybe not be so focused on the intellectual aspects of that. Obviously we’re not saying intelligence is not attractive – it is. We covered that in episode 75 like I said. But it’s not the only trait. It is a valuable trait; it’s not the only trait, and you have to see how that fits into your life in general.
Before a long-term relationship, that’s something that's going to be very important, obviously where it’s more of a life partner on many levels, not just the sexual relationship, the dating aspect. That’s where that is.
Have you got anything else to add on that area, Jackson?
[Jackson Hunter]: No, I think we’ve covered it all.
[Angel Donovan]: Great. I think the one last thing was, where do you live? Where do you spend your time? We kind of touched on this, but you really have to put yourself in the right place and the right path.
It may mean that you should go up and should go and live in a different place if you really feel like you’re interested in certain types of women but you’re not meeting them enough. It could be simply that you’re in the wrong place, right? It might take a hard decision, like moving cities or something like that; this is a strategy.
If you think about your hundred-year question, you look back on the types of women you wanted to date, and if you’re in a small town and most of the women you’re interested in are in a specific town, or maybe they’re in a big multicultural town like New York, London, Los Angeles, Shanghai, or many other places where there’s lots of variety of different people and so there’s more niched interests and so on.
If you think you can connect with someone, maybe it’s worth uplifting your life and going there. If you look at that hundred-year question and you look back on your life, “Where should I have gone if I wanted to maximize my chances to have great relationships?”
Obviously, Jackson and I, this is something that we’ve done a lot; we’ve both traveled a lot, and our lives are much better for it and we’re with a much broader perspective. I feel like our sexuality and our expressiveness and all that has benefited from our travels and living in different places and connecting with different women, which we touched on a little bit earlier.
You might have to make changes in your life if it comes down to that. This is just a bit of a strategic fort, like how you’re putting yourself in the right place, and it might be the design of your social life as well. What kind of job do you have and so on.
The last part is just losing interest. You said, “I find that often lose interest in a girl just as we’re starting to get to know each other.”
We spoke about this in an interview with Justin Lehmiller I think, where we were talking about some people get involved in relationships because they don’t think when they’re hooking up.
But there’s also the opposite, which is true. If you think you can figure out she’s not right for you, then you move on. In some situations, that’s good; when you can hook up you don’t want to get into a serious relationship with someone you’re just physically attracted to and it’s like hormones are carrying you through it.
It also could be a mindset here – and I’ve seen this with some guys – where, as Jackson said, you’re being over-intellectual and because of this you don’t get physical very early in the relationship. Maybe after a couple of dates, you’re still not physical. You don’t give yourself a chance to develop that aspect of the relationship and develop attraction, because if you’re not doing anything physically, I think attraction tends to wane anyway. It tends to die out on both sides, as with a man and a woman.
You have to let yourself go and take the chance and escalate physically like kissing and so on, and let that aspect of your relationship develop. Sometimes if you miss the boat, it will kind of wane.
The reasons behind why guys don’t escalate physically and take things forward physically, those fears of rejections – all the usual stuff – fears of losing the girl. If you’ve had painful relationships, breakups in the past, maybe you’re scared of that and you might just be telling yourself that you’re not going to kiss her because you’re not sure about her and so on. You didn’t take the chance to see that compatibility. It’s something you have to keep an eye on.
You should also be letting yourself get emotional, get immersed and not resisting that. If you find yourself resisting, letting go and resisting being emotional – I was guilty of this. I think this is pretty common for some guys at some part of their life.
I went through a period where I was less emotional, less immersed in my relationships with women and so on – it wasn’t beneficial to getting to know them or getting attracted to them. You’ll find that the more you let go, that you can actually develop attraction with a greater variety of women that you would have originally been interested in and you can broaden your horizons.
Again, just on that last note, something that can be a useful tool for developing this part would be the orgasmic meditation from the last podcast or our recent podcast episode, which was episode 80. That’s a very useful tool for learning more and getting more in touch with your intimacy, letting go, being able to communicate that with women, because it’s a big part of what they do. They’re in the One Taste organization, orgasmic meditation, so that would be useful for you.
The other really important thing in terms of letting go has been called the rake character. This was originally defined by Robert Greene, the best-selling author. He was on episode 47 and we talked about that into quite a bit of detail. This talks about how the greatest romances of the world were emotionally connected; they were very emotionally free.
They let their emotions out, which isn’t what we see a lot today in society in terms of the masculine image, like being able to unleash your emotions and your charisma on women. We also talked about in episode 51 with David Tian – emotional transference, where we talked about mirror neurons and the science behind that and how it works.
The reality is that mirror neurons mean if we communicate our attraction to women, she’s going to reflect it back and it will also get stronger as well. There’s this aspect of if you’re inhibited, that spark doesn’t start and it doesn't start bouncing backwards and forwards between you creating that attraction.
If you don’t show some kind of level of attraction to her, she is going to respond in the same way with her mirror neurons, right? So check out those two episodes. You’ll find those really useful in learning to establish these kinds of emotional connections.
The last point I just wanted to make is that for all of this self-awareness building, a great tool is keeping a journal. This is something that everyone in the academy has to do, because every time you write something down, you see it a lot more closely, you see it a lot better, so it’s like a daily diary. You write about your encounters with women – whatever comes to mind, how you reacted to them, what you noticed about yourself, your attraction to them, what you felt maybe turned you off.
If women are doing certain things that are turning you off, you can examine why that is and if it’s actually an issue with you or an issue with them. This is a way to explore yourself – a journal. Very important.
I would say the number one two pieces of advice that we talked about today are getting your testosterone levels checked and doing that journal every day, and you’ll really learn a lot about yourself that way, and I’m sure you’ll be able to overcome this.
Jackson, you got any last notes to add on this?
[Jackson Hunter]: The only last thing I’d say is just don’t be afraid to get in touch with your primal side, like a caveman, if you will. There’s a reason that sometimes dumb guys tend to do a bit better with women; it’s because the smarter guys or more intellectual guys, they think things too much.
Often attraction isn’t happening on an intellectual level; it’s on a very primal level. There’s a reason it’s a base instinct, it’s a base drive; it’s one of the biggest motivating things that we have in our life, it’s something that everyone feels.
Thousands of years ago, people were having sex way before they were talking and doing things intellectually. It’s something with the way we feel; I think if we can just get in touch with it, it will come out and it will grow. This is something that I’ll do myself now is I’ll just get in touch with that.
If I’m in a bar or a club talking to women, I’ll often just pick her up and grab her and spin her around or throw her over my shoulder or something – not just some random woman whom I haven’t spoken to; there has to be a certain degree of attraction and comfort there first so I know she’s going to be okay with it.
With women whom you have back at your house, just get physical with them. Pick them up, be very masculine, be the man and let her embrace that feminine role. Let her be little and playful and let her feel your strength.
The more that you’re thinking about this in your head, the less likely you are to do it. As Angel was saying before, being physical and making a move – don’t be afraid to do these things. You’ll often be thinking, “Should I kiss her?” or “Shouldn’t I kiss her?” By the time you’re thinking this, you should just already have gone and done it. Just act from your instincts.
If you want to kiss her and you’re feeling that attraction, just lean in and kiss her. Just grab her. Basically, I don’t think girls will ever be turned off by it; they appreciate the fact that you’re a man who’s going for what he wants. They might not kiss you right there, but it will actually increase her attraction for you.
The more you start doing this, the better it will feel. You’ll feel like you’re acting from your intentions and you’ll feel like you’re on the right path; it will feel good. The more they start being physical with women and kissing them and picking them up and being playful and touching them – this is how it’s supposed to be; this is what it should feel like and you’ll enjoy it and it will encourage you to do it more.
It will be like this cycle that feeds itself and you’ll start doing these things more often, which will lead to better results, which will lead to more confidence, which will lead to doing these things again and again. Definitely that’s something that you want to explore as well.
[Angel Donovan]: Yeah, that’s all great stuff. Just recently in another episode, we spoke with Dave Pounder – he has a lot of life experience; he’s a porn director/swinger and so on. One of his recommendations is to watch the movie Closer with Jude Law and many other stars.
That’s one of the best films I’ve seen also, which shows you what this attraction can look like and how it involved bold masculinity that Jackson was just talking about. I think that will give you some ideas, like if you take bolder risks and act more as the masculine role, I think you’ll feel more of that attraction as well naturally with women.
Just to round off, thank you Richard for your question. We really appreciate it. I hope this was helpful. Feel free to email me, let me know how that was or if you’ve got any more questions.
Any of you other guys, if you want to get questions answered, it’s very, very simple. There's a couple of ways to do it. You can call our US voice mail line and just leave your question there. That’s 323 757 5006.
Or perhaps you’re outside of the US, or maybe you’re at work or in front of a computer and you want to do it online instead, you can go to datingskillsreview.com
voicemail and you can just pop it in there with our little app there and it goes to the same place.
Every Monday, Jackson and I will process these and I’ll go up shortly afterwards so you’ll get your answers shortly.
Thanks so much for listening guys, talk to you soon!
[Jackson Hunter]: Good stuff.
