“AZ” wrote:
I am rooming with one of my buddies from college and we go all the way back to freshman year. I am from [foreign country] and I started college when I was 17, and as I grew older I began to act more like a man, but my buddy has not. He will talk for hours on end about inconsequential shit, how this 6 looked at him, and how he wants to pound crotch all day long etc, yet does nothing about it. What is driving me to the edge here and making me write this email is that [REDACTED]. At this point I’ve been trying to help him out, introduce him to game, get him to be less of a looser, but I have given up hope.
How do you deal with your beta friends that don’t want to learn? I don’t want to stop the friendship, and I have been trying to avoid him, but we hang out about 2 hours a day. How do I stop myself from cringing in his presence and resenting him for being himself?
If you are going to publish this in the mailbag please omit all personal details.
There were a lot of personal details, so I had to redact a full paragraph worth of juicy beta goodness. Suffice to say, it was nauseatingly bad, involving awkward hugs, egregious service worker tips, and invitations to cheesy strip mall restaurants. On the scale of game acumen, 0 being no game at all and winging it spergy style, and 10 being a Casanova for the ages, AZ’s friend was a -2.
Unfortunately, AZ, women do judge men based on the friends they keep. It is one of the more glaring psychological differences between men and women, and it has evolved for a good reason: men get all they need to know about a potential mate by looking at her for a second, while women need to recruit information about potential mates from a variety of sources, direct and indirect, because a visual impression is not nearly enough to trigger a woman’s full blown attraction for a man.
The ideal alpha projection attraction multiplier (APAM) social circle is a mixed clique of good-looking and socially savvy men and women, where you are the coolest guy among a group of slightly less cool guys, and the girls are hanging on your every word. You want to shine among your friends, but you don’t want to shine on the cheap by surrounding yourself with nerdos. Girls will not give you cunt watering points for being the exasperated leader of a bunch of social rejects.
A good example of what I mean is the movie ‘Swingers’. Jon Favreau’s character is basically a chill, decent guy with some issues connecting with girls. But he’s not so socially inept or teeth-gnashingly clueless that he continually embarrasses his cooler friends. Thus, Vince Vaughn’s character never experiences moments of crisis like you are in your email to me deciding whether or not to sever a friendship entirely for the sake of meeting girls.
I know some of my male readers will complain that a genuine alpha — a real man — never puts hos before bros, but that’s the kind of principled talk that almost always disintegrates in the acid wash of reality. If a male buddy you hang out with regularly is so blockheaded that he’s actually costing you chances to meet girls, you have to decide if the friendship is worth prolonged dry spells. For most men, that answer would be a resounding NO, despite their high-minded rhetoric to the contrary.
You see, a real man, besides having principles, also makes the difficult and unpopular choices. He screens out the losers when building a social circle of friends, and he dumps those who have demonstrated an unwillingness to take the advice of their betters to meet the high standards of the group. Your roommate is not special; there are many guys like him — stubbornly regressive, hopelessly ignorant, constitutionally spastic. A man like that is as much a product of his genes as he is of his environment. Maybe you enjoy his company when it’s just you two LANing it up Quake-style, and maybe he strokes your ego just by being there, nipping at your heels like an orphaned chihuahua. And that’s all good, until it’s time to go out into the real world and you find yourself making up excuses to avoid him. Am I right?
You can play that game for a while, but you’ll feel like crap constantly having to come up with reasons not to hang out with him. That he’s your roommate makes it doubly hard. Avoiding a college roommate is like avoiding your mom when she wants you to mow the lawn and your friends will be over in two minutes with a ride to the beach. Trap doors and escape chutes come to mind.
My advice to you is this: Give your friend one last chance to prove himself worthy of your company. But this requires some sacrifice on your part. Don’t just throw him to the wolves, blindfolded. Bite the bullet. Explain that his social skills suck, that he kills your chances with girls when you two go out together, and that he has to shape up fast if he wants to live the good life. Tough love is what we men are good at. Then offer him some tips, and show him where he’s fucking up. If he can’t abide your conditions for friendship, you have all the moral imperative you need to use him when he’s useful (playing video games) and dispose of him when he’s not (all real world activities). Get used to ignoring him. On your way out the door to parties, learn to visualize him as a lamp, an inanimate object you have no responsibility for placating. In fact, alpha males are skilled in the art of visualizing the vast hordes of male competition as lamps. Steal a page from their playbook.
[crypto-donation-box]
