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Conversation with a Pickup Artist

If there is something I really enjoy in life, it is meeting like-minded people. If there is anything I enjoy even more, it is meeting someone who has a set of beliefs completely opposed to mine, but whom I can’t prove wrong by reason. Now that is someone with a refreshingly new perspective.

He was one such person.

Tall, respectably well built and bearded with hair uncut in months, he resembled more of a hitchhiker than a playboy. I was not aware of his little hobby when I had decided to to host him at my place for a night. The truth came to light from his own mouth, and while there was all the possibility he could have been making up these stories, I saw firsthand the way he dealt with the girls, and I could see they loved him, his boyish charm, his jokes and his attention.

Expectedly, my first question to him was, “So can you give me any tips?” What he revealed is probably what you already know. The art of picking up is essentially the art of marketing, except this time the product is you yourself. Just as how a good salesman goes about selling a product, you have to believe in that product, make sure it looks good, that you pay attention to what the customer wants and you present the product as being able to satisfy that want, that you go to the customer instead of waiting the customer to go to you, that you learn from past mistakes and keep trying and that you sell the product to as many people as you can.

“It’s a numbers game Krish. You go to a club, line up every girl and tell her “I want to fuck you”, one will eventually say yes”, he shared with the casualness of a playboy.

Of course, to me the real curiosity was in knowing why he did it. Why was this promiscuous lifestyle preferable to the faithful, one partner life preached to me from such a young age.

“Where I come from, 80% of all marriages end up in divorce after 5 years. The girls I date know what they are getting into and come on, there are no strings attached and I am having a lot of fun”.

How do you argue against that?

What he presented to me a was a different culture, a different lifestyle that was right to him but felt wrong to me, fundamentally because our cultures operated on a different set of beliefs. I could try to live by his lifestyle, but it would be incompatible with that of mine. There was once an Singaporean friend of mine who met a Caucasian girl online. After much chatting, they arranged to meet at a club. He brought me along for some courage (not sure how that works) and we reached there much later than her.

The line outside the club was long and boisterous, so my friend tried to call her, only for her to hang up the call every single time. His excitement faded and a look of worry and betrayal appeared as he tried hard to figure out why she did not respond.

“I don’t want to go inside anymore”, he confessed. “I am afraid once inside, I will probably see her in the arms of another man”.

If I had brought my new friend there, he might have went,

“Well, there are other girls inside right?”

That is where the difference lies. 

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