Rules of the Game

by Neil Strauss

  HER: [silence]

  YOU: [changing the subject] Oh my God, I’m sitting outside right now and it’s so beautiful. It’s like the perfect temperature—not hot, not cold. How far away are you?

  HER: About fifteen minutes.

  YOU: Great. See you soon.

  8.

  When both women come over, instantly engage them in an entertaining, nonsexual activity, such as playing a female-friendly video game, doing one of your value demonstrations, or helping you go through your closet to find clothes to throw out.

  9.

  Offer them a drink—not to get them drunk or even tipsy, but just to create a romantic, transgressive mood.

  10.

  At some point in the first fifteen minutes, excuse yourself to go to the bathroom or make a phone call. It’s important to leave the women alone for a few minutes to get acquainted.

  11.

  Shortly after you return, bring them to your bed for a nonsexual activity (such as showing them pictures or videos on your computer). Rather than positioning yourself between the women, let the woman who is more likely to be possessive (Woman #1) be in the middle.

  12.

  At this point, the women will know what’s going to happen, and will most likely begin to initiate it by being playful or suggestive. Casually start making out with Woman #1. As you do so, hold the hand of Woman #2.

  13.

  Now make out with Woman #2. As you do, guide her head so that you are both making out just above Woman #1.

  14.

  Now move your head away and, if necessary, gently turn Woman #2’s face toward Woman #l’s. Most often, they’ll start making out passionately, thus beginning the threesome. Throughout, make sure that neither woman gets jealous of the attention you’re giving the other—or the attention the other is giving you—even if it means sacrificing your own pleasure. One time in twenty, they may not want to kiss, but they will both want to be with you. So simply take turns progressing with each, making sure they’re both always receiving at least some sort of attention from you, even if it’s just eye contact.

  EPILOGUE

  A Note to Female Readers

  You may be reading this and thinking, “Oh my God, this one guy totally did these routines on me.”

  You may then think, “I was tricked.”

  This note is to reassure you, in a non-sarcastic, non-glib way, that these routines exist only to help men avoid awkwardness and rejection.

  You cannot be tricked into sleeping with someone you don’t want to. On the other hand, you can very easily be dissuaded from sleeping with someone you do want to. These routines were designed to prevent men from scaring away or boring to tears someone they like or love or desire.

  If any of this material disturbs you, just remember that the rules of the game weren’t created by men. We’d love to walk up to you and say, “Hi, let’s exchange phone numbers” or “let’s get coffee” or “let’s get married” or “let’s fuck in that alley right there.” But if that worked with any regularity, you’d have hundreds of guys approaching you and saying the same thing every day. So, consequently, you’ve developed a screening process to separate the desirables from the undesirables.

  Though the routines are designed to follow your rules—not the ones in your conscious mind, but the ones in your subconscious—in the end, you make the decision. You say yes or no, stop or go. And whether or not a guy is using these routines has absolutely nothing to do with whether he’s being sincere or phony or whether he’s a good or bad person.

  If a man is using these scripts, all it means is that he’s read this book and he doesn’t want to lose you due to his own nervousness or inexperience or anxiety.

  So is this material manipulative? Of course it is. Every great romantic comedy begins with some sort of manipulation, even if it’s just a woman purposefully dropping something in front of the guy she wants to meet or a man pretending to be more successful than he actually is. As human beings, it’s our nature to manipulate. Even a baby crying is trying to manipulate his parents for food or attention. The real question you should be asking when meeting a man isn’t, “Is he trying to manipulate me?” but “Is he trying to manipulate me with good intentions or bad ones?”

  And if his intentions are good, you know what to do.

  THE STYLE DIARIES

  THE RULES OF THE GAME GOVERN OUR LIVES,

  OUR PROSPERITY, AND OUR HAPPINESS.

  THE RULES OF THE GAME ARE EMOTIONAL

  AND NOT LOGICAL.

  THE RULES OF THE GAME HAVE BEEN THE SAME

  THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY, REGARDLESS OF RACE,

  CULTURE, OR NATIONALITY.

  THE RULES OF THE GAME ARE IMMUTABLE.

  THE RULES OF THE GAME CAN GET YOU LAID,

  LOVED, MARRIED, IMMORTALIZED.

  THEY CAN ALSO GET YOU BETRAYED, DUMPED,

  DEPRESSED, STALKED, BEATEN, STABBED, SHOT.

  HANDLE THEM WITH CARE—FOR THESE PAGES ARE

  INTENDED NOT AS PRESCRIPTION

  BUT RATHER AS PREVENTION.

  THE STYLE DIARIES CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  RULE 1:

  ATTRACTION IS NOT A CHOICE

  RULE 2:

  ONE BROKEN LINK DESTROYS THE CHAIN

  RULE 3:

  GAME IS A BORDERLESS STATE

  RULE 4:

  KNOW THE TERRAIN BEFORE TAKING THE JOURNEY

  RULE 5:

  WHAT YOU PERCEIVE IS WHO YOU ARE

  RULE 6:

  EXPECT THE BEST, PREPARE FOR THE WORST

  RULE 7:

  WHATEVER’S IN THE WAY IS THE WAY

  RULE 8:

  EMOTIONS ARE REASON ENOUGH

  RULE 9:

  LOVE IS A WAVE, TRUST IS THE WATER

  RULE 10:

  THE COMFORT ZONE IS ENEMY TERRITORY

  RULE 11:

  NO MAN WINS THE GAME ALONE

  POSTFACE

  PREFACE

  “What are your goals?” he asked.

  “My goals?”

  “Yeah. Unless you know where you’re going, you won’t know how to get there.”

  “I guess my goal is quantity, quality, and variety. My goal is to make out with women I just met, get blow jobs in club bathrooms, sleep with a different person every other night, and find myself in strange sexual adventures with multiple women.”

  He sat in silence, listening, so I continued. I’d never articulated it before, either out loud or to myself. This was several years ago, just after I had discovered the Rosetta Stone of attraction in the form of an underground society of master pickup artists. “I want to corrupt young virgins, reawaken passions in bored housewives, seduce and be seduced by stars, students, centerfolds, businesswomen, and Tantric goddesses. And then, from amongst these women, I will choose one to love.”

  “How will you know when you’ve found her?” he asked.

  “I guess I’ll just know, because I won’t want to be with other women anymore.”

  “Well, that sounds like a good plan. And it makes sense to a point.” I waited. I knew he was about to find the flaw in my logic. “But what happens after a year or two years, and the sex isn’t as exciting anymore? What happens if you have a child with her, and she becomes less available for you emotionally and sexually? What happens if you go through a rough patch and start fighting all the time?”

  “If those things happened, I’d probably want to sleep with other women.” I watched him as he lifted his legs off the floor and crossed them on the couch in a position of spiritual superiority. “But I’d just have to control myself. I suppose I could think of other women like cigarettes. Even though I desired them, I would refrain from indulging because I’d know it was bad for the health of the relationship.”

  And then I waited for it, the inevitable question. He was a music producer, yet he never seemed to work. Instead, I’d meet him at his house in Malibu, and we’d spend hours discussing the meaning of life while his Indian houseboy brought us bottl
es of water and plates of vegan food.

  “So,” he said, “you’d be okay spending the next fifty years sleeping with only one woman?”

  He had walked me into the weakness in my romantic strategy, and probably in most men’s. I love women’s laughter. I love their lips, their hips, their skin, their touch, the way their faces look when they’re in the throes of sexual ecstasy. I love the way they nurture, feel, care, intuit, understand unconditionally. I yearn to create that bubble of passion, which draws us into the moment and connects us to the energy of the universe. And I cherish, more than anything, the moment in bed right after the first time, when all that there is to hold on to has been given. “Well, that would be difficult for me,” I admitted. “Ideally, I’d like to be able to have my cake and eat it.”

  “I think that’s a reasonable request,” he said. “After all, cake was meant to be eaten. Who actually orders a cake, then doesn’t touch it?”

  “So what you’re saying is that there’s a way to be in a committed, loving relationship, yet still sleep with other women?”

  “I didn’t say that. All I said is that there’s a way to have a cake and eat it.”

  “How? Even a monogamous relationship is a challenge. That’s why twenty-five percent of all crimes are domestic violence, that’s why the divorce rate is fifty percent, that’s why the majority of men and women have cheated. Maybe the relationship paradigm that’s been forced on us by society isn’t natural.” He looked at me disapprovingly. I continued anyway. “Even if you’re faithful for those fifty years, you still may check out a woman walking by or leaf through a copy of Maxim or look for porn on the Internet one night. And this is going to make your partner feel like she’s not enough for you.”

  “This is true. You can’t have a healthy relationship if your partner doesn’t feel secure.”

  “Exactly. So, considering the nature of men, how is it possible to make a woman feel secure in a relationship?”

  “Probably by not wanting to have your cake and eat it,” he said.

  “But that’s not natural. You just said that cake was meant to be eaten.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “you’ll have to find a way to eat it without hurting someone you love.”

  I hated him sometimes. For being right.

  In the days that followed, I sifted through the conversation in my mind, searching for answers. I talked to men and women everywhere I went, asking each the same question: “If you didn’t have to worry about having children and you didn’t need someone to take care of you when you were older, would you still get married?”

  Most men said no. Most women said yes. And that was when I realized that the traditional relationship model is defined by a woman’s needs, not a man’s.

  Then I started asking a new question:

  “Let’s say you met someone, clicked on every level, and wanted to date this person. But the person said that after two years, he or she would disappear from your life forever and there was nothing you could do about it. Would you still date this person?”

  Most women said no. Most men said yes—some even said the scenario would be ideal.

  So where does that leave the “one woman, one man, happily ever after” myth that is the basis of our entire civilization? Apparently, on an unbalanced scale, because the natural instincts of men seem to be to alternate between periods of love relationships and periods of hedonistic bachelorhood, with some traumatized kids thrown in as an evolutionary imperative.

  When I next met my friend, I shared my conclusion. “That’s kind of a sad way to live one’s life,” he said.

  “Yeah, and the problem is that’s exactly how I’ve been living mine. Except for the kids part. I don’t want to traumatize them, so I’m waiting until I figure out a solution to this whole relationship dilemma that satisfies the needs of both sexes.”

  “You’d make a good politician,” he said, not as a compliment. ‘You’re the type of guy who can’t kill a fly, a bee, or a cockroach himself, but has no problem hiring an exterminator to kill a whole swarm of them.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means,” he said, setting down his bottle of water, “that your ethics are fucked up.”

  We live in a society that likes to make clear-cut judgments—between good and bad, right and wrong, successful and unsuccessful. But that is not how the universe works. The universe does not judge. Since the dawn of time, it has operated on just two principles: the creative and the destructive. We have come to terms with the creative impulse—that, after all, is why we’re here—but we live in fear of the destructive because that, one day, will be our reason for going.

  I don’t want to just offer you a self-help book and tell you that, if you follow it, in thirty days your life will be perfect. There’s another side to the game: the destructive side. And, the more successful you are, the more you’re going to rub against it. Especially since, more than any other instinct we have, the sexual impulse contains both the creative and the destructive.

  The inspiration for this book was the preceding series of conversations, which point to a seemingly irreconcilable disparity between the sexual and emotional needs of men and women—not to mention a reluctance to admit and express them. They also underscore a similarity that transcends gender: the fear of being alone—and the dramas and comedies that occur because, as the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder put it, “we were born to need each other, but we haven’t learned how to live with each other.”

  The eleven stories that follow are true, and all except two happened during the period in which I immersed myself in the pickup artist subculture and was given the alias Style, as chronicled in The Game. Unlike The Game, however, these stories are less about getting the girl and more about the nature of desire itself. They loosely trace the metaphorical arc of a man’s dating life, building toward the question that none of the pickup gurus I met while learning the game was able to answer: What do you do after the orgasm?

  Fiction writers are lucky: They can hide behind the flawed characters they create. Here, the only flawed character is me. In the process of approaching thousands of people to master the game and myself, the three engines driving my behavior—hereditary instincts, family upbringing, and social forces—came into constant conflict. As a result, I hurt people’s feelings, made bad choices, took unhealthy risks, missed important opportunities, and committed irreversible blunders.

  I also had some amazing sex.

  And therein lies the conflict.

  From each of these experiences, I’ve tried to extract a lesson. And that hasn’t been easy. Because some of these experiences never should have happened in the first place.

  RULE 1

  ATTRACTION IS NOT A CHOICE

  I am sitting on her couch and she is waiting for an answer.

  She is offering me French lessons.

  She is sitting too close. She is talking too slow. She is accidentally on purpose grazing my knee with the back of her hand.

  She wants me.

  She has to be at least sixty.

  And, somehow, I feel myself drawn in.

  I know the symptoms: dizzy, light-headed, eyes defocusing, room melting, PC muscle contracting.

  I look at her: she is old, man. And not a good old. Just plain old. And worn-down. Brittle black-gray hair piled sloppily atop her head. Pea-size pores freckling her face. Body like a bag of gravel. Blood-pressure socks. Varicose veins. Granny glasses. Mustache.

  I have to get out of here. Before it’s too late.

  “Gotta get back to writing … me, too … well, bye then … sure, a French lesson would be… I’m not sure when … work and all … but, yeah, definitely … and give my best to Josh … thanks … you, too.”

  Jesus. That was close.

  We have lived on the same floor of the same apartment building in Pasadena for six months. We’ve passed each other in the hallway many times. She’s always with her autistic son, Josh. I feel bad for her. She’s a si
ngle mother, and has sacrificed her entire life to take care of her son and nurture his autistic musical genius. He knows the name, lyrics, chords, recording date, and catalog number of every Beatles song and is not too shy to recite them to strangers. He never forgets a face or a fact. He has aged her prematurely.

  Yet every time I run into her in the hallway or the elevator, there is this tingle. This energy. I feel drawn in and hypnotized. I can’t describe it any better. But I know it’s attraction. I want to kiss her. It makes no logical sense. The only older women I’ve slept with were ones any red-blooded boy would go for: long legs, workout bodies, spray tan, shampoo-commercial hair. I’ve never been drawn to a woman like this before. Yet, sometimes, at night, as I prepare to sleep, my hand will lazily drift into my boxer shorts. And I’ll find myself thinking of her.

  I live in Los Angeles. I see some of the most gorgeous women in the world on a daily basis. They’re everywhere: carrying their crappy little show dogs, sitting in Starbucks on a Tuesday afternoon because they’re too pretty to work a day job, jogging along the beach like they’re auditioning for America’s Next Top Model.

  And what do I do? I masturbate to the sixty-year-old crone in my building.

  I could have anyone in my fantasies. And by this point, I could have just about anyone in real life, too. Why do I keep choosing her?

  Two days later, I’m taking the elevator to the garage with the previous night’s companion, Darcy. She is sexy but shady. Claims her job is throwing parties for men in Las Vegas. I would like to go to one of those parties sometime.

  “Hi, Neil,” a loud, nasal voice greets us when we step out of the elevator.

  It’s Josh. He met Darcy in the building once before, about three weeks ago. He just turned fifteen. He’s starting to get acne and feelings around girls he can’t explain. He likes to talk to me about masturbation and how he hates his mom.