I've come to view all the skills we learn as a way of designing a love life, as opposed to just living life like every other afc and depending upon chance. I like this philosophy since I have a scientific background, and also like other males I think more logically than emotionally. By the time I finished engineering in university I understood how mans technical achievements were accomplished; everything could be designed and calculated in advance and when the device was built it would work.

At that time I had no knowledge of the community, like other afcs I Ieft my love life to chance. I'd had a great girlfriend for over 5 years and figured another would come along with patience. A couple more cool girls came along though, and I couldn't keep them around!

I got into the community in 2009 and am starting to have some successes. I instantly changed my attitude and that helped me close a couple girls that were already friends, but I've finally had my first success where I designed the whole pickup from beginning to end, and led the whole thing. The target only had to make herself present. I even got away with switching targets when I met my first target for a day 2 and decided I liked her friend better =)

I realize that love can be just as formulaic as engineering now; instead of math and physics our toolkit contains openers, dhvs, routines and closing guidelines. Even better is with some experience in engineering, I know that I rarely even use my toolkit anymore, my intuition and experience in the field is much more effective. I know given time pickup will enter the same realm of unconscious competence.

When I was more ignorant I was envious of women, thinking they had it easier than men. However, I am beginning to think men are the lucky sex. Since our attractiveness is based much more heavily on traits we have direct control over, with some effort we can have more complete control over our love lives. Also, I believe given a group of people it would be much easier to quickly select the good female mates than the males, meaning once our skill set is in place we shouldn't have to filter through as much riff raff to find a good mate.