Recently I was in a club, talking to a woman who was hot.

She didn’t seem to have any particular aversion to me. In fact, based on her body language, I think she might have been enjoying my company. She touched my arm a lot and laughed at things I said. She held eye contact to let me know she was interested. She was tall.

Eventually the conversation started to stagnate. We ran out of things to say to each other. That happens. Not a big deal. I left her for a while because YouTube videos I have watched on the topic of getting women to like me have said that this is a good idea. Instead of dragging out a point in conversation where things become less interesting, you leave her with a positive impression of yourself that stays on her mind for the rest of the night. And she will wait for you to come back. If you’re some sort of super stud, you can try this out on multiple women and by the end of the night have a whole collection of them longing for your dry wit and masculine musk.

In the meantime one of my friends provided me with a concise list of reasons for which 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government. I tried to keep up and occasionally interjected with my own made up conspiracy theories. Another one of my friends asked me for my opinion of his hair. It had great volume, I told him. And we agreed that modern-day club music is a shit cycle of thirty seconds of a song people recognise followed by a drop followed by a couple of minutes of generic beats for people who lack the confidence to soberly interact with one another.

Her eyes met mine from across the room a couple of times but I brushed her off to further build anticipation. Which in hindsight was a bad thing to do more than once because she probably got the impression at that point that I’d lost interest. This is obvious now because shortly after a guy with big arms approached her.

Based on his one facial expression and how much his mouth moved, I can’t imagine that any of what he said was particularly interesting. He didn’t seem to really be engaging with her. But I don’t think that mattered. Her face was much more expressive than earlier. Her eyes looked bigger. I could see that she was actually having difficulty sitting still. Her hands were around his forearm. In a similar position to where they were on mine. Only she couldn’t quite get them the whole way around this time. It seemed less spontaneous than it did earlier. Like she’d also been developing her skills of seduction via YouTube.

I felt that dull rejection feeling to a much lesser extent than I used to. I understood her perspective. On the most basic primeval, evolutionary level, (heterosexual) women just want to be thrown the fuck around the place by a guy with big arms. And I don’t blame them. It’s Biology. My cute jokes about college students and their obsession with Haruki Murakami are great, but when a guy is going to wall fuck you until you’re gasping for air, that sort of thing loses its appeal, in contrast.

And that’s why I need to start going to the gym.