Three years ago I was a 46-year-old guy who truly believed that I was at the end of the road in terms of being successful with women. I certainly lacked any sort of “game” – whatever that was.

I had been a relationship virgin all my life and was desperate for a girlfriend. Apart from a brief period of accidental sex at University (in common with many men), my dating record was parlous. Even more troubling, over the years since leaving University and qualifying as a lawyer, it had gotten worse and worse and then my sex life dried up altogether. In the process I achieved the impressive feat of amassing the largest collection of female friends known to mankind, whilst simultaneously failing to sleep with any one of them. This was in spite of success in other areas of my life.

It did not make sense. I had “made it” surely, by Society’s standards? Where were the girls?!

“Too Late, Mate?”

So I was really desperate…

I was on the way towards my fifties and I had tried everything from life coaching and counseling to meditation and group therapy. I had even resorted to asking girls what my problem was! I had had countless conversations with countless friends (many married, most in relationships) and had begun to feel like a total misfit.

I had hit on so many women and been on so many dates with so little success that the whole thing had started to become quite ridiculous. Nothing seemed to work to fix the problem and I eventually became convinced that nothing could change.

I was clearly just “not one of those guys” and never would be. I began to identify completely with my status as a sad, sorry character. I decided that I must clearly have “issues,” that marked me out as a loser in this area.

I was doomed.

The Ugly Truth

Now, what of “game’? What of, “pick-up?” And what  was a “PUA”?

As a liberal intellectual with a good education and a successful career in one of the professions I was part of the establishment. I also came from a reasonably affluent family and had grown up with traditional values. My grandfather and uncle were both vicars. My father and mother were both upstanding and respectable. I grew up virtually inoculated against the very idea of pick-up and the seduction community.

On the odd occasion I may have stumbled on it online, I would have said to myself, “These guys were scumbags and losers!” They were outcasts, operating on the fringes of society, like pick-pockets and drug-dealers. They across as actors, but of a vaudeville sort. They were pantomime actors, acting out childhood issues in grotesque fashion. “What could they possibly have to teach me?!” I said, defiant. They deserved to be pilloried in the press.

And yet things were getting desperate. I was struggling in a terrible run of friend-zoned, non-relationships, culminating with a pretty Polish girl, Beata. I remember leaving a message on her mobile, “Will you be my girlfriend?’ It was a massive failure to launch. “Alex”, she replied, “I think we need to talk.”

And so I started watching videos online. First it was some PUA conference. Was there really such a thing?! I watched, both fascinated and disgusted, as a room full of guys listened attentively to the precious pearls of wisdom flowing from these dudes’ lips. “Ugh!” I said, not wishing to identify myself them, “Nerds and losers!” And yet what was I doing? What did it say about me if all I was doing was watching and prevaricating at a safe distance rather than taking action? If they were nerds, but I was someone watching nerds at a safe distance, what did that make me?

And so it was that I delved even deeper into this world. Now I had browsed books like Neil Strauss’s, “The Game” and whilst I had, of course, surfed videos on the internet and YouTube, the night-game approach in bars and clubs all seemed too foreign to me and the idea of staying up until the small hours in order to pull girls out of night-clubs was not up my street, certainly at my time of life. It was then that I stumbled on Daygame.com*. I first discovered this Oxford-educated dude called, Tom Torero, doing  videos online and then this led me to the company he worked for at the time, set up by a guy called, Andy Yosha, called Daygame.com.

*Daygame is the method used to approach women in the daytime, whether on the street, in shops or cafes. The “London Daygame Model”, as it has been coined, is the particular technique that I learned.

The Plot Thickens!

Daygame.com was a company with a strong online presence. They taught men how to approach girls during the daytime and it was all quite different from the night-gamers depicted by Neil Strauss. And the guys from whom I learned this stuff seemed surprisingly normal. Daygame.com sold the concept as a rite of passage that men needed to go through.

They explained that the ideas and conditions prevalent in modern society prevented men from ever going through this rite of passage. Worse, society had hoodwinked them! It was reminiscent of the film, Fight Club. Guys who were into this stuff lived in an underground world, feeling that society had let them down and that they were acquiring a special and secret knowledge that others lacked.

These guys might be geeks, misfits, or eccentrics but they were not the pick-up artists ridiculed in the media as sketchy narcissists with childhood problems who preyed on women.

Some of them were regular guys who had turned their lives around in this area, having become totally frustrated with their own terrible dating histories, and were now teaching it professionally and with a certain missionary zeal. I met many who spoke articulately and intelligently on this subject. Guys needed to know this stuff, they claimed, and had been handicapped in life by being kept from it. Men needed to reclaim their manhood.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

I began to realize that there was far more to this whole thing than going out and hitting on girls and getting laid. And I began to realise that there was a whole set of skills to be learnt that no-one had ever taken the trouble to teach me (least of all school or parents) and that was really my birthright as a man. For some reason it was all hidden. A secret that no-one had told me about. I was about to embark on an uncomfortable ride in terms of having to swallow some difficult truths promulgated by society and accepted by a lot of men (and women) without a second thought. It wasn’t me that was the problem. It was just I had never learned this stuff. I did not even think it could be learned.

I took action and joined a Daygame.com boot camp in 2014.

Over the next 18 months, it eventually seemed that the impossible might become the possible. It might not be, “Too Late, Mate?” (The title of the book I wrote about this period in my life.)

Three years on I now find myself embarking on a yet further adventure, 52 First Dates, in which I hope to find a partner or, failing that, deepen my knowledge and gain a lot more practical experience about the mysterious, puzzling and intriguing world of women and dating…

You can email me at: alex@streetstories.co.uk

Alex Forrest 2017