Have you ever thought of using a sex surrogate?

If you don't know what they are, they're basically a psychotherapist who has sex with you. It sounds like you could benefit from one. Or perhaps going to a tantric priestess. Perhaps, you may want to look into it.

I think I saw something like that in a softcore porno on Showtime from the 90s with Shannon Tweed. But seriously, that's might not be a terrible idea. I was thinking along the same lines when I got a hooker in Amsterdam but that didn't go well.

http://www.salon.com/2003/10/08/virgin_6/

dude.. made an account just to post here

speaking from experience this sounds like massive anxiety.
performance anxiety (the dating and obsession over not getting laid , inability to getting a job etc)
social anxiety (inability to interact well with people from the past etc since you don't have a ****ing answer when they ask the dreaded "what do you do for a living mister?")

The key to not giving a **** is just to realize that nobody ****ing cares about your problems.

You need to stop the self pity train because women has a radar for low confidence\self esteem , and to no one's surprise that does not get them interested in you.

Most women don't give a **** how you look or how you get your money..as long as you have confidence.
Now this is not easy to fix on your own, but luckily you live in a modern world where going to the psychiatrist is not frowned upon... so get your ass there and do some cognitive therapy.

Its going to be a somewhat long road , but its so much better than ****ing about in self pity!

Good Luck, sincerely from somebody who has been there.

ps. hope this wasn't too harsh!

Nice read. Posting to subscribe. It doesn't take very long to go from being terrible with women to being average/above average once you get a little momentum. I say go on dates with the first ten girls who might possibly get your dick hard, and try to move things forward physically if the dates go decently well. Worst case scenario, you'll spend some $$$ make a few mistakes and figure out what you don't like

Santiago in June is kind of a dumb place to be if you have access to the northern hemisphere. Not intolerable, but frequently gray skies and sometimes rainy and/or a little cold. The weather today sucked (may have actually snowed this morning, a major event here based on what I saw on my Facebook feed) though it's supposed to be getting warmer the next few days. I'll be here for another two weeks.

Interesting read and certainly applicable to my situation. Maybe there's hope for me yet. Maybe a trip to California is in my future.

Anxiety abounds for sure. Not so much the "inability to get a job" part since I'm not trying to get a job, although if I ever end up on a job search I could see myself being anxious about that too. The interview process could get pretty surreal for me, I'd imagine.

That sounds tough and very Clint Eastwood but I don't think it's useful advice. For example, my spectacular lack of success with women. I'd either have to be uninterested in women or else insane and delusional in order to be able to decide to just not give a **** about a major life fail like that. I'm in a bad spot as far as that's concerned and I think it would be utterly bizarre to ignore this and pretend everything is ok. Of course I obsess about not getting laid. I'm ****ing 41 years old, I've never had sex without paying for it, and I've never been in a relationship. Deciding not to give a **** doesn't sound like a solution to me. My current situation is unacceptable and I still give a ****.

Of course I should try to present myself as favorably as I can, but "just be confident" isn't useful advice.

My issue with regard to how I got my money is that I did nothing to earn it. I happen to have some money, which is convenient, but since it fundamentally has nothing to do with who I am or anything I've done, I take no pride in having it. I can buy what I want. I can pay for lengthy vacations and eat in nice restaurants when I want to. This is useful and convenient, but that's all it is. Confidence or the lack thereof isn't about money either way for me, at least not directly. (Indirectly, some of my confidence issues stem from the sense that I haven't accomplished much in life, and maybe I would have done more with my life if I had had to earn a living. Or then again maybe not. Can't say for sure how things would have played out in that alternate reality.)

A reasonable suggestion. When I get back to the states I'll consider it.

Fwiw, even though I'm obviously still terrible with women, i have been getting more practice since I've been down here in actually meeting women. This is coming after 10 years of not meeting women, so it's progress of a sort. I'll post more about recent developments soon.

But before I do that, I have a frivolous request. Please give this blog a one star rating.

Within the next two weeks I will be returning to the US. My Spanish is a lot better now I think, especially my conversational Spanish. I'm still not any closer to deciding where I want to live long-term, and I'm not sure if it matters really. I can just do more traveling. There's no great need for me to settle down anywhere while I'm single and rudderless, which I might be for life. Looks like my previously unstated (but totally obvious) goal of getting laid and/or meeting my future wife on this trip has failed (well probably, because I still haven't completely given up on Laura, but most likely that goes nowhere too and I can get super depressed about it on the flight back). I did manage to meet some women, and on balance I was actually more successful in that department than I would have expected. But that's only because my expectations were insanely low going in. And otherwise not much happened. I'd evaluate my overall trip experience on the plus side of meh.

I'm going to make a series of shorter posts tonight, because I've had my laptop freeze up before in the middle of composing a lengthy post, and that really sucks. But these post divisions are arbitrary.

I love it when this thread pops up at the top of my subscriptions.

I think you are selling yourself short. You are too results oriented in the women department. It seems like you consider anything short of getting laid a failure. The way I see it you went down there with little game and worked on how to meet and talk to women. It sounds like your were successful in that department. I have coached basketball for the last 20 years and I am constantly telling kids that working on the foundation and mastering that is more important than making a shot. Proper foot work, arm position and follow through all must be mastered before you can make a shot consistently. You are working on mastering the early stages of meeting women for a potential relationship. You have waited this long, a little while longer wont hurt to much. You got this, just work on the little things first and eventually you will get to the prize you are seeking! I am hoping you get there!

Ok lets see, last middle-aged girl-crazy near-virgin adventure concerned the non-dates I never had on Tinder. So that was dumb. I'll post more about Laura in a bit. But first a maybe kind of fun though as always disappointing interlude about a voluptuous Argentinean girl named Daniela who liked my karaoke rendition of My Way, not the Frank Sinatra version but the Limp Bizkit version. As you might guess I was drunk. She came up to talk to me briefly afterwards and I didn't think much of it, but then later my roommate Bob who had been sitting at her table (language exchange, quasi-random seating to mix things up) mentioned that Daniela kept asking him about me once she found out I was his roommate, and that she was hoping I'd be there the following week. Good lord this makes her sound like an idiot ("Who was that drunk gringo doing the Limp Bizkit song? So cool, I must meet him!").

So anyway I went the following week too and saw Daniela there, so I sat next to her. It was easy to make her laugh (while we were mostly speaking in Spanish, something I would not have been able to pull off earlier in the trip) and pretty soon she was touching me and obviously leaning in way too close as we talked. Although I enjoyed the attention, I failed to reciprocate on a physical level which I'm sure after a while conveyed the message that I wasn't interested, so that was the first mistake. Then she wanted me to guess her age. Obvious trap question and I ****ed it up spectacularly, because not only did I guess 30 when she was really 25, but then because maybe my Spanish still isn't all that great I misheard her as saying she was 35 instead of 25. So I asked why she was offended that I thought she looked 30 when really she was 35. Why couldn't she take it as a compliment that she looked young? Honest mistake though, I was not going for the "sick neg".

This is a healthy perspective and overall I think you're right. I have made some progress on this trip for sure. I'm doing awful, but on the other hand I'm doing better. This was preceded by 10 years of literally nothing in the women department, so keeping that basis of comparison in mind my progress in the last few months has actually been amazing.

I keep saying I'm going to post more about Laura, and I will, because she's my current unhealthy obsession, but not tonight. And a little more about Bob too.

For reference here's what I posted before about Laura.

I've been meeting up with her periodically for Spanish lessons. She will text me a time and place, and then almost invariably she wants to push the time back on the day we have scheduled, which isn't a problem for me because I don't have anything else going on but it's definitely a quirk of hers. I'm not quite sure but it feels like it could be some kind of a control issue she has or maybe she's just that disorganized. At least she's been decent about showing up on time once the schedule has been pushed back. So we'll get a table at a cafe for an hour and a half and run through mostly conversational Spanish but also reading exercises and vocabulary, and that's fine except that she sometimes interrupts things to respond to texts, which I could see having that happen occasionally but it's too often.

The red flags keep coming. I've noticed that she's weirdly distrustful of me, like when it's time to pay the bill at the cafe and I put in my share it feels like I have to convince her every time that I'm not trying to cheat her (in reality I tend to err on the side of paying a little more than my share). After the lesson we walk back to the metro station together and I was going to write that we have a nice rapport and enjoy each other's company, but in light of everything else I just wrote that sounds absurd. What fits the pattern better is that I'm just the kind of doormat she likes to keep around, so she'll throw tidbits of affection my way. A few times she decided to do some grocery shopping on the way back and invited me to come with her, and of course I tagged along because in my mind that's extra time I get to spend with her (I'm just starting to see through this now). She's distrustful of the cashiers too and one time I held her grocery bags while she went through every item she purchased and checked it against the receipt, explaining to me that "you have to do that here, you'll get double charged constantly if you don't check." She's a very frugal girl, that Laura.

Really common for me to fluctuate between opposite poles of "I want to spend the rest of my life with her" and "She's a terrible person, I hate her." Was going to write some more stuff about Laura but I'm in that mode now. The description that comes to mind at the moment is "narcissistic bitch" but in five minutes she might seem wonderful and amazing, so whatever, swirling chaos in there. Changing the subject.

It turns out that Bob isn't any better with women than I am. A few weeks back we had a talk where I admitted to him that the only time I had sex was with a prostitute, and he said that was true of him as well. He mentioned a massage parlor in Santiago that he's been to where they give happy endings, and I have the website bookmarked, but I probably won't go there. The idea of some random woman jerking me off for money doesn't even seem that exciting to me. Might as well just watch porn, there's no connection either way. But then just last week Daniela was all over me and I didn't even think to close the deal so wtf.

I am really enjoying reading your honest thoughts. I think it takes a lot of courage to go in depth on such personal topics on an open forum. I really admire you in that respect.

I'm not very good at giving written advice. I've already written and erased three different paragraphs of advice because they didn't perfectly relay what I intended. I will just say this. I think you are better off completely severing contact with Laura based on the things you've written. Make the desicion to not see her, talk to her or read her Facebook etc. This may happen naturally anyways because it sounds like you will be moving, but I don't think there is a good reason to wait. The moment you do that it will be easier to find a new Laura because you don't have the first Laura constantly in the back of your mind clouding things. The next Laura you meet might not have so many red flags and you won't have to think about all the prior missteps you made with Laura 1, real or imagined, every time you see Laura 2. The next Laura relationship probably won't work either though. Not necessarily just because you don't have the required experience for it to work, mostly because of simple odds. What are the odds you meet the right Laura, who you are right for one another, on your second try? You're getting experience though, you made less missteps then you did the 1st Laura. You know more of what you do and don't like in a relationship. So you move to Laura number 3. Which will be easier and it will likey go a lot better then the first two, but again this one probably won't work out in the end either, etc. This process snowballs until finally your experiences will lead you to find the right Laura, and also important, you will have the right experiences to have molded you to be the right EvilSteve for her.

Scientists very rarely get the results they wanted from their first experiment, but they almost always learn something to give the next experiment a higher chance of success.

Thanks but it's got a lot to do with the relative anonymity of the internet. I'm not this open in real life. I wouldn't feel comfortable mentioning the existence of this blog (or my 2p2 account) to people I know. On the other hand, would it really be such a disaster if they found out? There's some awkward, embarrassing stuff in here but nothing I'm fundamentally ashamed of.

I won't be taking your advice on Laura, in fact I'm meeting with her tonight. The thing is, I signed up for a group of Spanish lessons and paid in advance, so I'm at least going to finish out the string. But my eyes are open now. Laura is at the very least a neurotic woman with lots of issues and I no longer think it would be a good idea for me to pursue a relationship with her, assuming that option were open to me. I could very well end up making some poor decisions if she decided to aggressively make herself available to me. But my guard is officially up!

So just now I walked into my apartment and checked whatsapp on my phone for a text from Laura (I only have service via wifi so I can only get these texts when I'm at the apartment). I figure she probably had to push back the time again, since we're meeting in less than two hours. But no texts. Then like a minute later, here comes the text, like clockwork. Can you believe it? She's running late again, it will have to be 4:30 instead of 4:00. LoLaura.

I have a masters in sociology and although I don't do sociological research anymore, I often randomly come up with ideas for research projects. A few weeks ago, I thought about a potential project that studied men discussing emotional/personal things online. My theory was that the construct of masculinity deters men from doing so irl whereas the anonymity of the internet opens the door to them airing these things out online.

You need to be assertive with women. Most women will walk all over you if you give them the chance. And they will quickly lose any respect for you, which is the worse thing that can happen. You need to tell them how you want things to be. Stand up for yourself. Women do respect that. Tell this Laura that it is not acceptable that she reschedules your appointsment all the time and that she answers text messages in your class. Don't be whiny or aggressive about it, just tell her nicely but very firmly. Of course she won't like it at first.

Mainly I just don't see the point of trying to get Laura to change her behavior. She is what she is and there are other women out there who don't feel the need to act that way. I'm not going to try to get involved with her other than the Spanish lessons I'm already signed up for, and I'm leaving the country soon anyway. Before I was thinking, "but maybe I'll return and Laura and I can spend more time together, and really get to know each other, and then..." but seriously, **** that. She's got some good qualities and I enjoy being around her a lot of the time and I'm attracted to her, but she's more trouble than she's worth. In the context of Spanish lessons, she's kind of a hassle to deal with but I can deal. When she's not creating drama, she's smart and engaging and fun to be around so this isn't exactly torture for me, as long as I manage my expectations. I've seen enough to know that Laura isn't ever going to be who I want her to be. It does me no good to get angry about it.

The main cause of my emotional neediness, where I get crazily obsessed with every woman I meet who shows me the least bit of interest, is my underlying belief that I have to make things work with her, because I won't be able to attract anyone else. But on this trip I'm starting to see how ridiculous that is. The evidence shows that all I have to do is put myself out there and eventually someone else will turn up, and as I gain more confidence that frequency should increase (until old age starts pulling things the other way - hopefully I'm happily married by then). Moving forward after the initial attraction phase is another story of course. That's going to be my next challenge and it's a significant one. But the "women I'm attracted to are never going to be attracted to me" story has been exposed as bull****.

So yesterday, partly because I was trying to make myself forget about Laura, I decided to text Daniela. This was also partly motivated by Daniela being hot, and apparently still having some level of interest in me, since she randomly liked one of my old Facebook posts the day before. It's silly but without that otherwise meaningless "like" I wouldn't have texted her. So we texted back and forth and we're planning to meet at a karaoke bar tonight.

You're making progress brah

Great work! You are getting the right mindset! Keep it up bro.

Karaoke night last Friday was fun I guess. I got there too early which led to me drinking a lot just to fill the time. Struck up a conversation with an older Chilean guy at the bar and he started telling me about his business which had something to do with geothermal energy, and somehow I ended up with his business card and contact info and he kept going on about it, as if he thought I might have connections he could use in the United States. Once the actual karaoke night started at least an hour later he wanted to sing My Way with me as a duet (this time the Frank Sinatra version not the Limp Bizkit version). But he only knew the words "my way" and none of the other lyrics, so I sang the rest.

Eventually Daniela showed up with some friends of hers, and while she was friendly/flirty with me again, she kept telling me about how she wanted to sleep with her boss who happened to be sitting right next to her. But we had to be very careful not to talk too loud, because it was very important that he not find out, because this was our secret! Ok cool Daniela, good luck with that. All in all it was a very silly night.

A few days later she texted me to tell me that she "just doesn't understand men" and she was depressed because she kept getting mixed signals from her boss. Apparently she went to the movies with him on Saturday, and then they went to his house, but nothing much happened and he even complained to her that she had been too friendly with me the night before! I'm dealing with crazy people.

So then there's Laura. Of the Spanish lessons I paid for in advance I still have 1.5 hours remaining on the clock and although she's supposed to text me any minute now to schedule a time for us to meet today, it's an open question whether that's actually going to happen or not. My flight leaves tomorrow.

Under ideal conditions (i.e. when she's not upset about something) I really enjoy being around her. But there's always something wrong. It's too cold, or the cafe is too noisy, or she's tired, or her throat is sore, or I'm talking too loud and it's embarrassing her. Unfortunately and even though I know she's awful, I still like her and I find myself trying to manage her moods. I've seen guys in relationships like that and they seem miserable. I'm not even getting the benefits of said relationship. And yet I know I'm going to miss her when I leave!

It's late but I just wanted to post something tonight before I go to bed. Back in Michigan now and it's very clear I don't belong here (not so much the state of Michigan as my current living situation in this small town where I live with my dad and sister). It's actually pretty nice here, quiet and lots of space and I can take long walks in the woods without anybody bothering me which is something I enjoy. My cats are here. I was thinking about getting a PS4 and maybe a 32 inch HDTV for my room and I could kill time, no problem. And that would be a terrible idea. I very much do not want to get comfortable here. I need to gtfo. So I'm thinking I'll live in Colorado for a while. I might even try to get a job.

I ****ing miss Laura, which is dumb but I'll get over it. I just have nothing else to occupy my mind with.

I never really got into Korn in the 90s when they were popular but I've been listening to this album obsessively for the past week.

Just woke up and had no idea what day it was. Wednesday? Sunday? I thought back and was able to piece together that it must be Friday or Saturday then checked my phone to confirm, but they're all the same to me.