Your date for the night flaked on you. A nice girl, but a bit timid. You could see it coming. It’s 8pm in a completely unfamiliar city, and you have to pull a rabbit out of a hat. It’s time once again to create something from nothing, produce cash and prizes with no friends, no smartphone outside your apartment, no contacts, and no jump off points.
Is it necessary to do this to enjoy a trip abroad? What is the drive that compels me to do this? Normal tourists go to the museum. To the park. To the theater, or to the top of tall buildings. I rest up and walk around during the day so I can be on-point to talk to approach strangers at night.
First there’s the online pipeline. Match a couple hundred girls on Tinder, hope to find one or two measly prospects. Look up bars. Put them on the map, write directions in the looseleaf notebook that has become your best friend in a 4000-mile radius. Look good, have a drink or two, and form a plan. Drag yourself to bars you’ve never been to, but seem familiar just the same. Make clunky conversation with girls in a foreign language you just learned, hoping for the rush of that magical moment when the girl shows interest in you. The hook point, as some like to call it. I’m not a pickup artist. I’m just a guy who can’t be happy with what he has.
Could this rush be all that we do it for? Most of us make good enough livings that if sex was all we wanted, we could buy it hundreds of times over. Especially here. Avoid the expensive drinks, the work to defeat the social inertia, the pomp and circumstance. But it couldn’t replace the interest, however brief, from another human. The idea that they want what we’re selling. We’ve cracked the code, and now we’re making up for lost time. It is a type of vengeance against mistakes of the past.
I take a drink of my beer as I put on the one pair of dress jeans in my luggage, which is impossibly small for a 3-week trip by any reasonable standards. Who needs options when you’re wearing the same uniform each night?
I don’t “want” to go out, but an invisible force compels me onward. One more hook, one more makeout, one more notch. Its the variable reward schedule of game, and once you’re on the treadmill, good luck getting off. This city does not sleep, and I cannot waste my time letting opportunities pass due to false constructs like introversion or fatigue. Mind over matter is the only way to persevere.
The allure of the women here is undeniable. Perhaps that’s part of it, but that isn’t what really drives me forward. It’s the vague and irrational idea that I may be missing out, and the elusive prize might be at the next bar, the next approach, the next Tinder swipe. Maybe it will lead to something I haven’t yet experienced. We’re all just chasing novelty more forcefully as it becomes progressively harder to find. In that way, maybe we are no better than the uninitiated.
Its 9pm and my beer is finished. It’s time to go.
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