Bittersweet Goodbyes

“Will we ever see each other again?”, Victoria asked, looking into my eyes. She didn’t know what to do. “Maybe”, I replied slowly, “we’ll leave it to the hands of fate”, as I gestured into the darkness of the street. We kissed again, she giggled, gave me one last look, turned around, and left.

At the core of the player’s lifestyle there is a trade-off; there is a trade-off with everything, after all. By deciding to have sex with lots of girls you have also chosen, implicitly, that you will have to let them leave at some point. Whether that’s because they’re leaving the country, or you’re leaving the country, that they realise that they will never get what they want from you in the long run, or simply a better option shows up. Whichever way it happens, there is no “riding off into the sunset together”.

This is all part of the rollercoaster of emotion that Daygame provides. On a micro level you’re meeting tonnes of new people in the street and your body isn’t designed for it. At an intra-session level you’re going to be cast about emotionally. You open a set and she’s really on, your heart soars and you get excited, and at the end of the set she says “I have a boyfriend” and refuses the number. That sucks.

At a macro level, you’re pulling girls into your reality for months at a time, as FBs or in open relationships. You have sex, a lot, and cuddle, leaving oxytocin to dig its claws deep into you. But oxytocin isn’t a villain. Releasing that hormone is one of the most pleasurable things that a human can experience. So again we’re presented with a trade-off.

That macro level drama will be played out again and again, and I have it on good authority that once a year it really hits hard. I think that the strength of connection is based on an 80/20 rule of compatibility. 80% of the strength comes from how hot she is, and 20% comes from compatibility, but really I’m just using that as a catch-all term to describe “how enjoyable are your conversations”. Victoria hit the 80% hotness quota, but fell just short on the other 20%; she was a lot of giggly fun, a ball of blonde energy, but for me to really fall hard, to get that “one a year”, requires deep stimulation of my prostate cognitive function. We need to be able to talk intellectually.

Now let’s take the average man’s experience. He maybe has a girlfriend at school who he has sex with and falls in love with, his oxytocin cylinders firing romantically for the first time, but those relationships rarely survive university as both parties mature into adults. Then at university he gets the highest proportion of what will be his lifetime lay count. Once leaving university, if he’s not already in a long term relationship, he’ll meet someone at work. Either way, he’ll marry them, and that’s probably it for sexual partners. He gets the initial rush of oxytocin for the first year, it then mellows out and becomes comfortable in the second year, and then in the third it starts to ebb away.

This is exactly what happened to me, except I wasn’t married. The hormonal glue wasn’t there anymore, not at least for me. I was looking into my future and all it had was emotional monotony. Humans are emotional creatures, so that basically would mean flatlining happiness. One of the first things I experienced once becoming single again was the rush of emotion, the ups and downs of life, and for once in three years I felt cocky again. That special confidence which allows you to do anything. That feeling doesn’t arise unless you have need for it.

So the choice is apparent: given what “riding off into the sunset” actually entails, which lifestyle will you choose?

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown