“The Game” is such excrement, as though “pick-up artists” have something more than a clue that isn’t actually just pseudoscience wrapped up in jerk-tech and served with a side of patriarchy. If you want to prey on the vulnerable because you’re vulnerable, “The Game” is for you, otherwise you’re off on the wrong paddock. The only truth about dating between the ages of 16 and 23 is that it’s all crazy and nothing makes any sense.
You’ll profess your love to a few girls as a teenager trying to be sweet and chivalrous like in the novels and The Notebook and everyone’s favourite TV soaps, and you’ll get dropped like a log of firewood covered in spiders.

So you’ll play coy and maybe that’ll work for a bit, maybe you even get laid. Then you stumble on the best girl ever—mind like a diamond and a body to match. Oh ho, but guess what? She was raised old school on the land and if you want to walk with her you best come correct. Here’s you playing it off like it’s no big deal thinking a bit of hard-to-get never hurt anyone’s chances and then all of sudden, she’s gone—she didn’t think you were serious.

Next up you’re taken for a ride; a wild, glorious sweaty ride for months when you least expected it by a girl who likes to dictate terms herself. Didn’t think girls like that existed did’ya?! But actually they’re everywhere. She bowls you up one night out the back of Knightsbridge while you watch her smoke and wish you hadn’t quit. Just when you’ve excavated a come-on tucked away somewhere in your dense skull full of all that ‘game’ you realise she’s been playing you the whole time.

And finally you develop a fetish for the exotic and to your amazement all the other cultures of the world have all their own customs and they all fragment further based on social class and schoolyard clique.

So you’re buggered in the game of love and no advice from your girlfriends, an aged womaniser, fucksticks who choke women as an icebreaker or your dad is going to help you out of it.
So what are you to do? Well you might just try being yourself.

I know it sounds strange but it actually works real well in all its grand simplicity. If you like a girl, and I mean really like her, just tell her. If she likes you back then it’s a goer. If she doesn’t like you back then it wouldn’t have worked out anyway if you’d tried to game her into the sack and then tried to fan that kindling into a bonfire. The only thing burning would be you.

If you don’t like a girl and you just want to see her naked, then tell her that instead. Maybe you’d stand a better chance of success if you played her for a fool, but then the real fool would be you because now you’re a dickhead.

And if a girl takes your fancy and you’re real curious and you want a bit more than just to see her naked—maybe you want to have a weekend in the lonely mountains and a few late nights defending Jack Kerouac from her criticisms (‘the beatniks are such boys!’), then her tell her that. Why must we always assume that only men want flings?
There are six billion people on the earth and plenty of ‘em of want exactly what you do. It could be sex, love, babies, a fling, a frolick, a big white wedding down at the local Parish church, fornication dressed in fur, whatever…you can find it. And you will if you’re honest about what you’re looking for and how you feel about it.

So don’t try to make sense of it, just put yourself out there. Frankness has a surprisingly mysterious quality to it in a world full of wankers doing magic tricks and asking out 60 girls in a night at Mooseheads like that’s dignified.

You’ll fall on your face a bit, but that’s unavoidable, ‘cos like I said, these years are pure chaos. Once the mid-twenties roll around people have a better sense of themselves and want they want; they’ve been burned a bit and they’re not so scared or sensitive anymore; they’ve loved once or twice, lusted a bit more than that and they’re ready to communicate. Then you don’t need game, you just need character. In the meantime, just call for the hit and hope you come up 21.