During the early years of high school, I was considered cute by the girls in my class. One called every other night on my family’s landline to ask for help with homework. Her name was Anna. Sometimes she would call twice the same evening, mostly to ask about math problems that I had already explained to her before. After taking the call, my mother would bring the phone up to my room, I would return it to her after the call and a few minutes later she would be back up. “It’s Anna again!” Each time, I would close the door behind her because it started becoming obvious that Anna’s calls were not purely academic. One day I was in the middle of some mathematical proof with Anna, when someone else abruptly took over the phone on the other end and started talking with an annoyed voice. It was Anna’s best friend: “Hey you dumbhead: What Anna really wants, is to go out with you! Do you want to go out with her or not?”

I was dumbstruck. It was the first time someone had asked me that question and I had no idea what to say. I felt a wave of conflicting emotions: On the one hand, I knew I had a crush on Anna, too. But on the other hand, I also knew that my family did not approve of premarital dating. My parents had had an arranged marriage and even though I grew up in Germany, I was raised in strict adherence to conservative Indian family values. What mattered most was that I studied well and that I learned Yogic meditation. My mother always insisted that I should not be bothered to get engulfed in relationships until I had “finished my studies”. Drugs, alcohol, girls and sex were completely taboo. I was not even supposed to attend parties.

All these rules excluded me from much of the social life that was going on around me. I felt a bit alien but I also saw the benefits of this regime: increased focus and better school performance. I trusted that my parents knew what was best for me, so I obeyed. 

“OK, uhm, and where does Anna want to go with me?” I responded to Anna’s friend on the phone. When she explained that ‘going out’ meant ‘being together’ and dating, I said that I could not do that. I repeated my parents’ mantra of wanting to “finish my studies” before entering any kind of romantic relationship. They laughed and asked when that would be. I could not explain. Because I really did not know it myself.

The story of the interaction spread quickly and over the next few days I was made fun of in school. But I swallowed it up and returned my focus to those all-important studies – now without the nocturnal phone calls from Anna. I also never got asked out by a girl again.

Over the next few years I excelled at academics and went to the world’s top universities but unsurprisingly my love life was lacking. I had studied and studied and was just a couple of years away from obtaining what is arguably the highest available badge of successful studying: a PhD degree. Finally. I was about to actually be “finished with my studies”! 

So I started taking a more proactive stance. I educated myself about dating and quickly discovered that there was a huge literature and a YouTube universe on that topic. But I was put off by those pickup artists and all the weird associations that had already been planted in my head. “Love and dating should not be learned, it should come naturally!” So I looked at others in my American college environment who were “dating naturally” and discovered that this meant one thing primarily: getting drunk and high at parties.

I tried that and it worked surprisingly well! With alcohol and weed I suddenly felt smart and attractive. Miraculously I even knew how to dance and flirt! I got together with my first girlfriend during a boozy weekend – but realized on another boozy weekend that I actually didn’t like her that much. While drugs helped me break out of my shyness and insecurities temporarily, I could never really embrace them and felt that they went against my identity. I was still the child of Yogic meditators and lifelong teetotallers. Much of my parents’ philosophy and lifestyle actually made sense to me. Using drugs to gain confidence and short-lived pleasure just couldn’t be the final solution.

It also made me go over the top sometimes. I got summoned to the sexual harassment office of my university for trying too hard to kiss a girl at a house party who did not want that. I couldn’t even remember. And I tried to flirt with a cute bartender by licking drink vouchers after she told me that I could not use them because they had expired. I got banned from that bar for a year. Arrgh. I really didn’t want to rely on these stimulants anymore.

Online dating was just starting to be a thing at the time so my friends convinced me to create a tinder profile. After an evening of swiping I only got one match. It was a transgender person – ehhr – just not my type. It turned me off from online dating forever. So I followed another advice I had heard: “Don’t search at all! Things happen when you least want them to happen.” Matthew McConnaughey describes this realization in his memoirs. At some point he decides to stop “trying so intentionally to find the perfect woman” and right at that moment she walks into his life. “I quit looking for her. Then she came.” Well, that really didn’t work for me either. When I went back to just sitting in the economics library and doing my thing, I only heard the whistling sound of desert winds.

So eventually I turned back to those YouTube videos of dating experts and so-called pickup artists. I started actually doing some of the exercises these guys were proposing: talking to strangers on the train, pitching my vocal tonality downward, writing notes about what I could improve after each social interaction. It all still felt a bit weird, but slowly I started seeing results. After hundreds of rejections, I gained the confidence to ask girls out that I had met on the street and sometimes they would say yes. I was happy about this new-found success but I still wondered: Why did I have to do this weird pickup stuff, when everyone else thought it was stupid and wrong? 

After many years of reflection and research, the answer to that question came to me. And it made total sense. Most people grow up in sexually more tolerant households. The kids learn from siblings or extended family how to express their sexuality and how to approach the other gender. If not that, they venture out on their own and let alcohol and friend circles loosen them up to the natural flow of energies. My family was different. Throughout my youth, my parents held my eyes shut, switched the channel or exclaimed expression of disgust when a sex scene appeared on television. My sexuality had been heavily suppressed in favor of academics. And as a result, there were certain important skills that I had just never developed. In order to make up for the unusual and extreme conditions of my youth, I needed to go through some unusual and extreme processes now! Of course.

When I realized this, I started to embrace ‘game’ and understand what ‘game’ really means to me: the expression of one’s natural sexuality. Obviously, sex is critically important for the survival of the human species. So every culture has evolved its own way of teaching young members how to express and channelize their sexuality. Everyone who grows up “regularly” within such a culture does game! They just don’t have to pay a lot of attention to it because it is so deeply ingrained in their identity and culture. They don’t even have a name for it! It gets subsumed under broader cultural terms and happens as a natural byproduct of ‘partying’, ‘drinking’, ‘going out’ or ‘hanging out with friends’ – it’s just a part of normal life!

When Matthew McConaughey met his wife Camila Alves, she actually did not come to him. She only came to a table on the other side of the bar in which he happened to “hang out” that evening. And she did not come alone, but together with two of her girl friends. McConaughey waved over to them, but she did not respond. In that moment McConaughey heard the voice of his mother in his head: “This is not the type of woman you wave over from across the bar, son. Get your ass up, young man and go introduce yourself!” He went over to the table of three women, made conversation and got Camila to leave her friends to join him for an adventure that same night. He would not have been able to do that, if he had not done it hundreds of times before, throughout his youth, and with the full support of his mother. He would not have been able to do that, if he had not felt it a completely normal and right thing to do in his culture. He would not have been able to do that without having natural ‘game’.

Not all of us grow up “regularly” within cultures. Each of our bodies and family circumstances are unique: Some decide they simply do not identify with traditional gender norms. Some have a genetic predisposition, some have childhood traumas and some just grew up like me, awkwardly between two cultures. For many of us, there was something in our youth that inhibited our sexuality from blossoming naturally. These people need to make this area of their life explicit, study it and work on it with conscious effort. To me, that is game. And that is totally OK.

Footnotes

1. Title photo by Romi Yusardi on Unsplash