I’m at a crossroads. For the past two and a half years, I have been active within the PUA community. As a college student, there was no shortage of willing women, and boy, did I have fun. I was never looking for commitment. In fact – stemming from a bad break up which was the reason I began learning about pick up, I admonished commitment and did everything possible in my life to retain my independence. Unfortunately, this resulted in quite a few women getting burned by me.

As graduation is right around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about where my life is going. In most ways, it’s exactly where I want it to be. I have fantastic friends, and have my dream job lined up, and will be backpacking Europe for the whole month of June. Shit’s great.

Except, there’s a girl. She’s made me question everything that I have believed in for the past two and a half years.

Enter Amy.

Amy is a year younger than me, and we have been best friends since I met her freshman year. Never approving of my “whorish” ways, and having a boyfriend for the first two years we were friends, I never made a move. There really wasn’t any point. She was a fantastic friend and a much needed female voice in my life.
Amy was abroad all of Fall semester of this year, and had a girlfriend. She came back, single, and I was single. She matured quite a bit while away, and was for the first time, incredibly flirtatious. Realizing that I genuinely had feelings for this girl, I was curious to see where it was going to go. When the semester started, it was very much apparent she had feelings for me. I was cool with it.

Except, it never worked out. I got drunk, hooked up with an acquaintance of hers, which made her absolutely furious. Cue her hooking up with one of my friends.
We still talked, but it was very obvious we were incredibly jealous of one another. Too proud to back down and admit we were wrong, we kept hooking up with our individual mistakes. Last week, within two days, we both ended our respective relationships.

We’re both single, and I realize that there is not a girl I want more than her. For the first time in 2.5 years, I’ve got one-itis, and got it bad.

Now, from everything I’ve told you – it should be clear that we should just get together.

If only it were so easy. You see, the reason why I became such good friends with Amy initially is that she feels the same way I do about relationships and commitment. She loves to lead guys on, and then toss them away. In many ways, she’s a female version of me. She’s got a hard wall around her emotions, and I’m the only one she’s ever opened up to even the slightest.

Wherein lies my problem. I want this girl. I just don’t know how to proceed. I’m tired of game. I want something genuine. I’m love sick over her. I need this to work out. She is the only girl that I have ever had an emotional connection with. If it can work out, I feel like we would have something profound. I’m under no allusions of her being “the one”, or some bullshit like that, and I understand I’m still very young, but I feel as though if things do not work out I am liable to lock my emotions up even tighter which will seriously hurt me in the long run.

I’m at a crossroads.

I can try to continue to game her, but I just don’t see it working. I feel as though she’s scared of me, in the sense that I don’t want a relationship. My game is overly sexual and I think no matter how much calibrating I do, she just won’t go for it. She’ll see right through it and only get annoyed.

I simply don’t know what to do.

There’s the first option:
Open my heart to her. Tell her how I feel. Completely spill my guts.
It’s crazy. It’s stupid. It’s AFC. It’s everything we have learned NOT to do.
But I feel like I have to. Any attempts to game this girl will result in failure. She knows me too well, has too tight of a wall around her.

My reasoning for doing this is two fold:
First, I feel like admitting I have these feelings will be HUGE for me, regardless of it working, since I have never had these feelings before. By openly acknowledging them, it will be a positive step for me to finally tearing down this wall I so desperately want to get rid of.

Secondly, I feel like by showing her this soft spot I’ve been hiding for so long it will bring out hers. She’s got a wall as thick of mine, and me cracking might crack hers. Cue splendid, emotional sex and awesomeness.

Or, it could fail utterly since this is real life and not a movie. Fuck you John Cusack.

The second option is to just play the good friend and slowly escalate. Show her I want to spend time with her. Be genuine, but not completely emotional, AFC.
This would probably be more effective. But has a serious pitfall – I’m crazy about this girl, and I’m really not sure I can wait on something that may or may not happen.

Sorry that this is all over the place. My thoughts are so jumbled and erratic it’s really hard to formulate them into anything cohesive.

I’m just looking for some advice. Tell me what to do, please.

TLDR: I believe in a certain set of principles (independence, the stupidity of love, etc.), meet someone who has the same viewpoints as me. At first, I'm comforted. Its a reassurance that perhaps I'm not crazy in believing what I believe. Yet, as I get to know this person more, this person makes me begin to question these very principles.

Which is fine, in and of itself, I suppose.

However, the ironic, depressing part is that the very reason my feelings that I've developed for this person mean absolutely nothing to them because of the principles that brought me to them in the first place.

I'm convinced she has feelings for me. It's just getting them out. It may be stupid to waste energy on her, but I genuinely think it's worth it.

_________________
"I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center."

"I'm going to give you a definite... maybe."

Sounds to me like a very bad case of One-Itis.

Look, you are young, I've got a few years on you. Lemme drop some wisdom here.

First of all, anytime you mention John Cusack in a post, a severe case of One-Itis is a guarantee at that point. So let's just establish that.

You said you are fairly happy with where you are now in life, except your feelings for this girl are nagging at you internally.

I don't think your PUA "ways" have hurt you or burned girls. Those girls knew what they were getting into. And if you are feeling lonely and desolate, just consider that you could be sitting in some filthy ass apartment right now, living with some fat cow, who has just bore your second screaming child, who nags at you for diaper and tampon money constantly, while never cleaning the house and watching tv 22 hours per day.

Trust me, they exist, I was with one for a long time (former life as an AFC).

So, your PUA ways haven't hurt you, they've likely helped you, although now you have Massive One-Itis and are starting to doubt your core beliefs, which is fine, just realize why you are doing it: One-Itis.

You are going to do what you are going to do. But realize you aren't in a "bad" place in your life right now because of your PUA skills, just imagine living in the above scenario that your AFC skills would have provided.

If you pursue this girl, just do us all a favor and don't turn into a giant AFC, I don't want to read that thread six months from now talking about how you want to kill yourself.

Good luck to you and Amy!