The Natural: How to Effortlessly Attract the Women You Want (2 page)

Sad but true.

Growing up poor and paralyzed by fear and insecurity, I was so shy and messed up that I couldn’t even answer the phone or place a call to order a pizza! Needless to say, I stayed pretty much to myself. When I wasn’t at school being picked on or bullied, I played solitary video games for hours on end at our tiny apartment in the projects, or at my eccentric grandmother’s house nearby, while my mother worked as a long-distance operator at the local telephone company.

In short, I was a total mess.

  I was the kid at the neighborhood birthday parties and other gatherings that everyone always asked, “What’s wrong?” or “Are you okay?” Meeting new people terrified me, so I avoided it at all costs. I was nervous, shy, and socially inept. As a result, I often annoyed people by saying the wrong things at the wrong times. I was hopeless.

  Plagued by low self-esteem and with no dad in the house to teach me how to fight back, I was constantly bullied by classmates who called me names like “Big Head” and “Moley”—the latter because of the birthmarks that I still have on my face.

  I have no doubt that I was clinically depressed for much of the time, even well past high school. With few friends, I hung around mostly with my cousin Alistair, who was five years younger than me but miles ahead in the maturity department.

On the rare occasion that I was invited by a classmate or neighbor to attend a party or go do something, I would always find a reason not to. “I’m sick” or “I have too much homework” were my standard excuses. But deep down inside I was dying to be popular. And the older I got, the more desperate I became. I worried myself to sleep every night wondering if I would ever in my life have a girlfriend.

Here’s a classic example of how screwed up I was as a teenager. By some magical fluke (or probably more like a delusion in my own mind), when I was sixteen there was a nice girl in my class who I could tell sort of liked me. I spent that whole year fantasizing about her and trying to work up the nerve to say something—anything—to her, but I just couldn’t do it. After months of trying, the best I could manage was to leave a handwritten note on her bike saying that I liked her and that we should go out on a date sometime. Needless to say, that approach didn’t work, and she pretty much hid from me for the rest of the semester.

After graduating from high school as a total virgin—in fact, a guy who had never even held a girl’s hand, much less kissed a girl or gone out on a date—I entered a crummy little college because it was the only one that would accept me. My grades sucked as much as my social skills did: I’d regularly skipped out on classes all through school because I was bullied so much, so I was always behind.

Nevertheless, I decided I wanted to study to become a schoolteacher. First grade, to be precise. At least
those
kids wouldn’t pick on me, I reasoned—plus the coursework would be easy. Mostly, though, I wanted to go to college to try to socialize and to get a girlfriend. But, man, were my attempts pathetic.

One night that first year, I ran into a girl who lived in my dorm. She was stumbling down the hallway, obviously more than a little drunk, when she came over to me and said, “Hey, Richard. I’m … really horny!” My god, she was gorgeous. Even hammered, she was irresistible. So how did I handle this sensational opportunity? Why, in the wimpiest way I could, of course. I said, “Oh, dear,” patted her on the arm, and made a stupid excuse about needing to go somewhere—and then I ran out of the building as fast as I could. Afterward, I didn’t even have much regret. I didn’t know how to kiss, after all—never mind how to take things to a sexual level. The next time I saw her, she had a bemused look on her face. Sometime later she said that she thought I must have been a virgin. Bingo.

Around that same time, I was on the street one day when two super-cute female students around my age came over to me. One of them said, “Hey, you look a lot like my ex-boyfriend.” Just like before, all I could do was smile and say, “Oh, really?” before rushing right past them. Yet again, I let an opportunity to score evaporate into thin air.

A few months later, I was on a train when a group of gals started talking to me. One of them, giggling, asked if I’d ever had a threesome. “Wow,” I thought to myself, “this is my lucky day.” Not! You guessed it. Before I could work up the courage to ask for their names and their phone numbers, they got off at the next stop.

The bottom line is that overtly sexual girls scared the hell out of me, because I was clueless about how to handle them. This was never more evident than the night I was out at my local pub when an attractive young woman came up to me and said, “Would you like to lick my lizard?” I was like, “What?!” She then proceeded to show me a small lizard tattoo that she had on her belly. Shockingly, I managed to respond properly (that is, to respond
at all
) and I gave her lizard a quick lick. She stood there expectantly. As my mind raced through various potential comebacks, I said absolutely nothing. And so she left.

That was me—back when I had no cool. When I had no confidence. When I had no game whatsoever—natural, learned, or self-taught. It’s not like opportunities weren’t presenting themselves, because they certainly were. It was that I had no fucking idea how to recognize or respond to them.

I was a man without skills, tools, techniques, or tips on how to succeed with the opposite sex. To make matters worse, I ended up flunking that first year in college. Clearly, I was due for a change.

So I dropped out of school, moved back in with my mom, and took a temporary job as a marketing assistant at local software company. My primary duties were doing odd jobs and “gofer” work to help my bosses get their big presentations together. Easy stuff. I also tracked the daily stock market performance of the company’s main competitors. Although this was a small part of my job, I soon discovered it was the bit I liked the most.

During this time, I was pretty much a total recluse when I wasn’t working. I never went out at night. All I did was work, eat, play video games in my room, and sleep. I also saved my money and started studying the stock market.

Since my mom didn’t charge me for room or board, after a few months I’d saved up four thousand dollars from working. I asked a friend of my mom’s, who dabbled in the stock market herself, to invest it for me since I was underage and couldn’t trade for myself. I had a hunch and had her pursue it for me. I got lucky and that stock went up … about tenfold. This gave me the confidence to quit my job and try my hand as a personal investor—a day trader—working from home.

I got lucky once and thought I’d be the next Warren Buffett. While that didn’t happen, I did manage to stay afloat and not lose money. Some years I was up, others I was down, but I generally did quite well, given my poor track record in life. While a small bit of success was a divergence from my past, one thing definitely did not change: I was still scared shitless of socializing. When I look back now, I realize that the reason I spent so much time at my computer, trading stocks, was so that I could hide from the reality that I was very poor socially. With every click of the mouse and with every financial transaction, I got to feel important instead of incompetent and ashamed of myself. I can’t remember ever, during my years as a trader, leaving my house at night to meet women. I’d tried that before, in college, and it didn’t work. I was terrified to fail again.

One night, when I was twenty-one years old, I went to sleep with tears running down my cheeks. I’d spent all this time chasing money as a trader, and for the first time I realized that I was just doing everything I could to avoid the pain of being a pariah yet again. What I
really
wanted was a girlfriend. I wanted to be loved. I wanted to experience what it seemed like everyone else took for granted. And as I finally went to sleep that night, I told myself I’d give up everything I had to find that one special girl.

A few nights later I uncharacteristically agreed to go out to a nightclub with one of the few male friends that I had. This, in itself, was a huge accomplishment for me. Soon enough, he clicked with a hot-looking chick who happened to have a rather nice-looking friend with her. Because she and I were left to fend for ourselves, we had no choice but to talk to each other while our friends were off having a great time on the dance floor. I was nervous and couldn’t hold good eye contact, but I guess she liked my nice-guy mild manner. Meanwhile, my friend and the other girl were getting along so well that he wanted to take her back to his place. He offered to drop us off at our homes on the way, so we went to “my” girl’s street first. Everyone said goodbye, and she got out of the car.

As she walked the first few steps toward her front door, I sat in the back—paralyzed—gripping the seat beneath me for all it was worth. That’s when it happened: I had one of those life-changing moments when you force yourself to take action.

Asking my friend to wait, I lurched out of the car and ran after her. I called her name; she turned and I said, “Can I have your number?” She shouted it out with a smile. This was the first time I’d ever gotten a girl’s number in my life.

The next day, I didn’t call because I was too nervous.

I called her the day after that, though. She didn’t answer, but I managed to stutter out a brief message.

Heartbroken, I was certain that she had much better things to do than to speak to a loser like me. Amazingly, she called me back a couple of hours later after she got home from work. We arranged to meet for drinks a couple of days later. Things went pretty well, actually. It was my first date ever. We took it slow. I was psyched.

On our second date, I cooked dinner for her—another first!—at my place. Afterward, she sat next to me on the couch, put her head on my shoulder, and … and I stroked her hair!

On the third date, we finally had our (and my) first kiss—with her making the first move, of course. My bliss was short-lived, because as soon as the kiss was over she promptly informed me that she had a boyfriend. Lucky for me, she also said that the relationship wasn’t really working. But then she dropped another bombshell, saying that she was planning to start college soon at a school that was more than four hours away.

“Hey, no problem,” I assured her, even though we hadn’t even made it to second base yet. “I’ll book a hotel room and visit you every weekend.”