A reader asked me a question to the effect of whether guys expect sex on the fourth date. I thought this was very interesting because I hadn’t ever considered the concept before. Offhand, I would say “No. Sex is Not expected on the fourth date”.
 
Sex is expected immediately.

What He’s Thinking

The only reason he spoke to you in the first place was that he thought you were attractive. Similar to not renting a porno movie and waiting three weeks to watch it, he would like to hook up with you BEFORE he introduces himself to you. By the time you become aware of him, he’s already mentally done the deed a few times while he was figuring out what he was going to say to you to get the show on the road.

The number of dates makes no difference. It’s basically True or False. 1 or 0. Yes or No. She gave it up or she didn’t. \o/ So, for instance, a sequence involving sex on the fourth date would look like 0001. Sex on the third date would look like 0010, etc.

The guy is striving for 1111 and there’s really nothing more to say on that topic. :D

What She’s Thinking

Regardless of whether she likes the guy or not, the average gal on the scene is striving not to look like a ho. At some point in history, the Worldwide Queen Of All Women handed down the decree that the magic number for holding out that qualifies a gal as “not a ho” is three (3) dates. Therefore, observing strict adherence to the Women’s Handbook requires a gal to go 000 on her first three encounters with a guy so she will be beyond reproach if she decides to give it up after that.

Thus, the genesis of the question “Is Sex Expected On The Fourth Date?”. What’s going to happen if a chick goes 0000? What about 0000000000?

We See You Coming

Unfortunately for women, men already know what you’re doing. Some guys are willing to wait it out while y’all play games with yourselves. *yawn* Sooner or later, you’ll let yourself do what you wanted to do the first day we kicked it to you and then it’s Game On! :D

One of the failures of the three-date-abstinence rule is that no timetable was handed down regarding space between dates. This means that you can take a chick out three times during the week and still hit it on Saturday, just the way you planned it. It’s not like you only see her ON Saturdays, which would mean that it would take you an entire month to get on.

Another failure is that sometimes, holding out makes a guy MORE likely to hit it & quit it instead of LESS likely. Going out with you and not demanding sex might mean he’s willing to date you ad infinitum without hooking up. It could also mean that he’s got other chicks to kick it with while he waits for you to come around. This is one of the main reasons why I say that sex isn’t expected on the fourth date.

Never. Say. “Never!” ;)

Guys know that BEFORE the fourth date, chicks are gonna kick themselves for giving it up, so date #4 is really the first time they’re spending authentically uninhibited time with them. Assuming the guy hasn’t bailed already, if he’s waited out three dates, there’s no reason he wouldn’t wait out four dates or six or twelve.

You have to consider the reason why she’s dating you in the first place…

She’s going through her usual process to determine whether she wants to give you some or not. If she wins the game and you become her boyfriend, she automatically inherits responsibility for your sexual satisfaction.

It’s not like she’s NEVER going to give it up.. She just wants to feel like it’s a good probability that she’s going to get what SHE wants out of the relationship before getting down with the program.

So.. Date #4 isn’t any sort of significant milestone for a guy. It’s still a 1 or a 0. He gets on or he doesn’t. It’s not like a guy’s gonna say “Tarnation! :/ I took her out all four times like I was supposed to and she STILL didn’t give it up? I’m OUTTA HERE!” :D

If a guy likes you as a person, he’ll hang out with you whether he’s getting on or not. If he doesn’t like you as a person, giving him some most likely won’t change how he feels AT ALL. If you seem sincere in not wanting to have sex with him, most guys will be cool with that too.. Assuming, of course, you’re not the only gal he’s dating. :D

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What I affectionately refer to as “Revisionist History” may actually be more accurately called Historical Revisionism. There are actually two types, one which has a positive connotation and implies that intelligent people took another look at the data that’s currently available to them and came up with a valid interpretation of that data that differs from what’s been widely accepted about that event up until now. The second type is when people decide they don’t like how the past looks and decide to reinterptet it for their own benefit. The latter is what I want to talk about right now.

Time goes forward… Not BACKWARD. Things happen and then they move from the present into the past. Once they’re in the past, there’s no way for you to affect them, being that nobody’s created a time machine yet. If you tell a story ONE WAY at the time, and then turn around and tell a DIFFERENT STORY later on.. Assuming you had your wits about you when you told the story the first time, you are attempting to revise history. Here’s an example:

Back in the day….. (right, Frank?) I used to hang out with this chick that had a boyfriend and she would lie to him all the time about what she had done or where she had been for the last several hours while she wasn’t answering her phone. I didn’t think anything of this becuase that’s what people do when they’re in a relationship and they don’t want to suffer the consequences of their SO knowing who they really are.. They lie. Fine. I get that.

So this same chick tells me a story one day about where she had been on a particular evening when her boyfriend had been looking for her. The story was that her cell phone had run out of batteries and she had decided to walk home and it took her about an hour. This is what she told me and this is also what she told me she told her boyfriend.

Weeks or months later, her boyfriend does something she doesn’t like and then she tells me that on the night that she told him she had walked home, she was actually hanging out with other guys at a bar and having a good time. The reason this information came up was that NOW she felt vindictive and wanted to mentally feel like she was hurting her boyfriend. I say “mentally feel” because she never told HIM this version of the story. She only told ME so that she could feel like she was being defiant and get it out of her system so that she wouldn’t get dumped by this guy and then feel like a JERK when she got over it and wanted to be with him again….. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. She got over it.

Now.. I couldn’t give a damn what some chick tells her boyfriend. What I *DO* care about is that she decided to lie TO ME about it as well because she wanted sympathy at the time. He had been rather upset that he couldn’t find her and had SCREAMED on her and she was scared that he might dump her so she told me the same story she told him in order for me to assure her that walking home with a non-working phone wasn’t a dumping offense.

When you attempt to revise history, you erode your credibility. There’s no way around this. As long as there are people around who remember what really happened, you’re going to either look like a jerk who’s trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes or you’re going to look like you are currently EMBARRASSED about your past. Being that it’s the year 2009 as I write this and Social Media has been in full effect for quite some time now, there are a. whole. hell. of. a. lot. of. people. that watched your PRESENT in real-time. Whatever you posted at the time, that’s what people remember. There’s no way around THIS EITHER, other than never posting anything to the internet and ‘keeping your business out the street’.

Relationships

Relationships change. I know LOTS of people that used to date each other in ’06, ’07, ’08 and even ’09 that aren’t dating each other now. That’s not my problem.

Friendships change. I know lots of people that used to be friends and at the time of this writing, they are not. That’s not my problem either.

I have pictures with couples that are no longer couples and friends that are no longer friends. Regardless of how they feel about each other NOW, they don’t get to change MY history, which includes ALL OF US sharing good times together.

Regardless of what you say NOW (and you may very well have perfectly legitimate problems with your former SO or friend), y’all were rather happy with each other at the time and that’s the spirit in which the pictures were posed for, taken and posted. Up until you achieved a problem with the other person, you derived as much pleasure from the pics as I did, if not MORE.

What about The Kid?

Ethically, Morally or however you want to categorize it, I don’t get to have special privileges when it comes to revisionist history simply because it’s my camera. COULD I? Certainly. DO I? No. It’s all in the game. If you’re not going to play it the “right” way, don’t play it at all.

I currently have 1,887 Facebook friends, about 900 of whom I’ve hung out with at some point IRL. This means that every once in a while, someone I’m visually associated with is at least accused of and at most proven to have deviated from the norm.

Let me make this perfectly clear…

I. Will. Not. Adjust. My. History. To. Fit. How. You. Feel. About. The. Present.

If someone that I’ve spent time with falls out of favor with you, that’s YOUR PROBLEM and not mine. I don’t care. I’m not interested. You’re a grown-ass-man or grown-ass-woman so act like it and deal with your own problems.

If you decide that you don’t want to do business with me because I’m friends with someone who’s been accused of doing something stupid or has been PROVEN to have done something stupid, good for you. Between my own freelance work, Tribe Nine Creative, and a company I’m about to go on retainer to, I don’t have any more work-hours to assign to people that *WANT* to work with me, much less people that are concerned about who I hang out with or what it would mean to their company’s image to be associated with me, being that I’ve been visually associated with someone else whose internet presence they don’t like.

In fact, the whole concept is RETARDED because other than for television credits,

my name doesn’t even APPEAR on people’s video projects. The people in my Client List are there because I PUT them there. There are lots of companies I’ve worked for that are NOT listed, such as News Corporation / Fox News. So, if you don’t want to do business with me because of people I socialize with, enjoy that life. :)

Porno Chicks

In an attempt to see how it would feel to be embarrassed to be Facebook Friends with someone, I sent a friends request to this porno chick chick that I HEARD was a porno chick, hehe :) Fortunately, she declined my “friendship”! HAHAHA because I regretted it almost as soon as I pressed “send”. :D Facebook doesn’t have any facility for you to retract friendship requests, so, similar to pregnancy, I knew that once it was in there, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I wanted to know how I would feel knowing people had some tangible evidence that I had associated myself with a porno chick. Pretty much, that was the only controversial-type person I could think of to add and since I know a few sex-bloggers, I actually have mutual friends with her. It was a weird feeling. I’m not sure it was sustainable. On the one hand, it’s clear that it’s not YOU that’s being a freakazoid and on camera, to boot. On the other hand, being “friends” with this person implies some sort of endorsement of her lifestyle. That shouldn’t be a connection that’s made, but it’s made all the time, whether people mention it transparently or on the back-channel.

I needed to go to this extent because being that I’m an independent person and not a drone, I’m not interested at all in what people do or get involved in that has nothing to do with me. I didn’t have anyone on my current roster of almost two thousand people that I felt like I might be able to say “Oh, that’s just the last straw!.. I can’t believe he/she did that! :O”. Meanwhile, I know chicks that are upset that I call chicks “chicks”. :D I just wanted to see how it felt to be SOOOO interested in someone else’s business that I would elect to terminate my social media contact with them because of something they did or said.. ESPECIALLY something they’ve been doing I was told that they’ve been doing for years.

AAAAAAAAAAND STAY OUT!!! :D

The bottom line is that media has now been removed from the hands of the newspapers and television stations and placed firmly in the hands of common folk. That chick pointing a phone in your direction on the subway is taking a picture or video of you. There are video cameras watching the streets and the sidewalks in front of places of business. People are shooting video with their smartphones or their video cameras or still cameras or even their iPods now. Your best bet, if you don’t want to be involved in the Social Media game is to STAY. OUT. OF. IT. ENTIRELY!

If you’re not the subject, you’re going to end up in the background of someone’s picture or video. It might be someone you know or someone you don’t. You might be tagged in the media and you might not. If you know damned well that you’re not supposed to go to a certain party, DON’T. GO. TO. THAT. PARTY. instead of going and HOPING you don’t get discovered. That ended in 2008.

Even if you don’t show up in images, you’re going to show up in text. Someone’s going to post your name on Twitter or mention that they were hanging out with you on Facebook and then Google’s going to pick up that mention of your name or your handle and you’re gonna get busted.

Even if they don’t type your name onto the net, they’re going to TELL PEOPLE who they hung out with at the party. Even if they don’t post a picture to the net, they’re going to show it to their friends. The only way for you to attempt to regulate your online presence is to hang out with people that don’t post media to the internet.

Same thing goes for relationships. If you think your relationship might EEEEEEEEVER break up and you might feel sour about that, don’t go all over creation in 2010 posing with your current girlfriend or boyfriend. Save yourself the anguish and keep your relationship(s) to yourself, stop announcing them on Facebook, stop making lovey-dovey videos that you’re going to have to tear down from the net as soon as y’all fall out of favor with each other. It’s way easier to deny information that was never published than to try to reel in media that people have been looking at for YEARS already and were privy to anyway because they were standing right there when y’all were very happily showing off your friendship or relationship by posing for pictures together.

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Women are better liars than men. This is because, in general, women can immerse themselves in fantasies way better than men can.

If women want to start to feel turned on, what do they do?… That’s right… READ A BOOK!!! :O .. Some words.. In a little paperback novel with one picture of Fabio on the cover holding some chick that they project to be them. Suddenly!!!… A Puerto Rican gal sitting on her fire escape in Harlem, NYC is ACTUALLY a southern belle, dressed like the woman on the cover, riding in a Horse & Buggy with her Fabioesque lover whom she imagines is only having sex with her until 100 pages later where she reads that TMZ reported that her man has been ******* every maid and nanny that they’ve ever hired since their relationship began.

Meanwhile.. Does that work for guys?… HEEEEEEEEEELLZ NAW!!! :D It’s the exact opposite. We need VISUAL STIMULATION and AS FEW WORDS FROM THE CHICK AS POSSIBLE!!! :D And it had better be the RIGHT stimulation, too! :D Too skinny? Won’t work. Too fat? Won’t work. Not sexy enough? Won’t work. Not “slutty” enough? Won’t work. Too into it? Won’t work. Not into it enough? Won’t work. Not dressed properly? Won’t work. Not doing the right actions? Won’t work. Doing the right action in the wrong way? Won’t work…..

Guys have to have EXACTLY what turns them on in order to feel turned on. Meanwhile gals only need the mental suggestion of a situation and they fill in all the blanks themselves. THIS is what makes women better liars than men.. blank-filling.

Guys can only grasp the part of the lie that they can comprehend, so their lies are like the icing on a cupcake instead of the entire cupcake. Guys say stuff like “I was playing poker with the fellaz” and think that’s a complete lie. They think that’s it, because when they visualize the lie, they see themselves with cards in their hands, money, chips, a drink on the table, some cigar smoke in the air…….. and that’s about it. They don’t know what the table looks like. They don’t know whose basement they’re playing in. They don’t know who else was involved in the game. They don’t know what area the house was in. They don’t know if they ordered pizza. They don’t know what alcohol they were drinking or what brand. They don’t know what time they got there. They don’t know what time they left. They don’t know what was on the television or the radio. This is because they were ******* some girl and really don’t think their main girlfriend’s smart enough to catch them in ANY lie, EVAR! :D

Meanwhile, women HAVE all this information because they’re immersed in their lies. They actually believe them. When the novel says “Fabio took her hand…”, she SEES Fabio. She SEES his hand. She SEES her hand. She sees the carriage and the horses and the driver and the leaves and what color they are and how many of them are on the ground and how many of them are in the trees and the walkway and the house and the color of Fabio’s eyes and the type of dress she was wearing and whether it was hand-made or not and how much money was in Fabio’s pocket or whether the butler was holding the ducats so the lines of Fabio’s suit wouldn’t be ruined and the color of her skin as she blushed at the gentlemanly treatment she was receiving from her man……. :/

THIS is why you can’t beat women at lying. This is ALSO why women catch YOU in lies! :D When you say you were playing poker, she receives an incomplete picture of the scene and a whole bunch of questions naturally occur to her that you don’t have the answers to, such as which shirt you wore to the hangout. um… WHAT? :O Now you’re all defensive because the only thing you remember from last night is what that chick looked like from behind. Now that you know you’re about to get caught, you get nervous and jumpy and overreact to simple questions that should be as easy to answer as “Was the light red or green when you crossed the street two minutes ago?”.. and down the rabbit hole you go. SEEYA!!! :D

Interestingly enough, immersion is also the reason that women are way more SUSCEPTIBLE to lies than men are. If you have the proper relationship to her (read: She’s “in love” with you), you can tell her anything you want, such as “No, honey. I’m not having sex with up to 10 other women, most of whom are waitresses or some other minimum-wage-type job” and she’ll turn around and tell all her girlfriends that her man is faithful to her regardless of what the truth is.

You can tell her anything you want.. “Check it out, SUNNN…. I was in Central Park earlier, and the grass was RED!!! :O”.. 20 minutes later, she’s on the phone or texting with her girlfriend talking about how the grass was red in Central Park this afternoon as if she saw it with her own eyes. It’s just too easy. :)

Now, it might SEEM that MEN are more susceptible to being lied to than women are. That’s technically true, but not actually. It’s not that the men actually fell for the lies.. It’s that we weren’t listening and don’t care what you said. When the game is on and you decide that that’s the time to tell us your lie about what you did last night, we don’t want to think about such irrelevant drivel and we’ll “yes” you off so you can stop interrupting us. We like to devote as little mental energy and time as possible to conversations that YOU start.

This works out to the female liar’s advantage because when y’all say “I was at the mall all afternoon”, we don’t want to hear ONE. MORE. DETAIL about the mall. We don’t care which mall you went to or which homegirls you hung out with or what shops you went to or what you bought or where the receipts are or your parking validation. Nothing. Nobody cares. :D Meanwhile, you were all up under some dude all afternoon and you’re like “heh, heh, heh.. Got away with it AGAIN! >:D”.

It’s probably all for the best anyway because your woman’s better prepared to ANSWER your questions than you are to ASK her questions that might trip her up. Ignorance is bliss, I suppose. Everyone gets to feel good about themselves and the relationship continues.

Will this ever change? I doubt it. :) Guys are relatively dense. When their girlfriend asks them “How come you didn’t text me (or have any OTHER contact with me) for four days in a row?”, their response is “I was sick”. haha It really doesn’t occur to them that sickness wouldn’t have prevented them from pressing their thumbs against plastic to text her or AT LEAST hitting the ONE DIGIT that would activate the AUTO-DIAL that she knows he has her on in his phone. I guess he didn’t eat or drink liquids for four days as well? Even “I lost my phone and it was just returned to me in the mail” doesn’t work anymore because people have so many ways to contact each other via Social Media. Meanwhile, the obvious answer is that he was ******* the next chick for four days and forgot that you exist, or at least didn’t CARE that you exist until the better chick became unavailable.

So.. Think about the best liars you know… Are they women or men and what makes them better? O_o

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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So.. Like, every day, guys have to hear stuff like “I’m not a piece of meat” and “I want him to like me for me”, which doesn’t make any sense, because a woman’s looks are a PART of her “me”, so if a guy likes you for your looks or your body, stop trying to dismiss that like it doesn’t count for anything.

Having said that.. If a guy DOESN’T think you’re cute and/or your body ISN’T sexually inspirational to him and he dates you anyway, you might just have a long-term boyfriend on your hands…

Long Term Relationships

Attractive women are at a SEVERE DISADVANTAGE when it comes to LTRs, because they’re not going to look like that forever. ‘Matter of fact, I’ve met gals that looked completely different six months after I met them, so women that get the rap based on how they currently look have a tough row to hoe. If they cease to maintain their looks, dude might be outtahere like Belvedere.

That’s why I find these television shows really funny where chicks run around giving themselves props for their looks. Good Luck with that. :) It’s these same chicks that roam the subway stations looking like confused zombies once their looks are gone and they become has-beens and actually have to depend on their underdeveloped personalities to make friends and influence people.

Personality Development

Unattractive women have it way better. :) Their personalities are way more developed because guys don’t approach them for sex so the conversations are completely different. Guys make plans to get together with unattractive gals to watch the Yankee game and actually WATCH the Yankee game! :D It wasn’t just a ploy to get her alone so they could hit it.

If a guy ends up attracted to her, it’s for traits that are way less fleeting than looks. She’s likely to be just as cool as she is today next year. She’s likely to be just as intelligent and witty next year. She’s likely to be just as caring and attentive as she is right now for years to come. Meanwhile.. Women who got the rap for their looks are in peril of losing their man to the next better-looking female that comes along. Guys that date for looks are notorious for trading chicks in for the newer, hawter model like happens with cars.

Ease Of Maintenance

Another benefit to unattractive women is that nobody else is trying to kick it to them. :) You don’t have to work so hard to maintain your relationship with her because there aren’t guys lined up around the block trying to steal your girl.

I remember one time, this friend of mine started dating this girl and we all laughed our asses off about it because she was clearly busted, except the problem was that we hadn’t realized that she always dresses down. Months later, we saw her actual body and we were like “HOLY ****!!! :O”. We were like NO WONDER he had hooked up with her and he was suddenly heralded as a gold miner instead of a fool with zero taste in women. The point is that my friend was living on Easy Street because HE knew what was under the hood and nobody else did.

Trickle-Down Theory

Unattractive women don’t have to work as hard to meet men. This is because attractive women will bring them out partying so they can perform the duties of the DUFF, which is similar to a wingman, but not really. The DUFF’s job is to step in and cockblock when she sees that a guy’s trying to lay the attractive chick. The second part of the DUFF’s job is to make the attractive chick look even hotter, merely by standing next to her.

The DUFF’s payoff for performing her duties is that she gets all of the trickle-down.. The guys that didn’t get the rap to the attractive chick and are willing to settle for less or attempt to back-door the situation by making friends with the DUFF, getting her number and getting invited out for another shot at the attractive chick in the near future. Basically, by being “The Woman Next To THE WOMAN”, the unattractive woman gains access to hundreds of guys that would never have spoken to her at all, had she gone to that same bar by herself.

An added benefit to the trickle-down is that in most cases, the DUFF actually has a STELLAR personality compared to the attractive chick. Hawt chicks get hit on all day, every day and it gets on their nerves and causes them to react in a “Let Them Eat Cake!” fashion when a guy steps to them and tells them how beautiful they are for the 20th time since they walked into the club. A lot of guys are tired as hell of this and when they accidentally get deflected to the DUFF, they realize that she’s actually much cooler, smarter and much better company than the chick they meant to kick it to. This is why a lot of insanely attractive women are dumbfounded about how come they don’t get as many relationship offers as women who clearly rolled out of bed just before coming to the party.

Random Advantages

If she’s so inclined, it’s easier for unattractive women to cheat. This is because nobody would believe that someone actually hit it other than the dude that was “desperate enough” to date her in the first place. When she claims she was at home eating Häagen-Dazs, no questions are asked, even though she had actually been at the club all night shaking her ass, making out and getting numbers.

Unattractive women are also more likely to give unattractive guys a chance to date them. This means that they’re selecting from a much larger pool of men and are way more likely to hook up with someone that is actually SINCERE about wanting her to be his boyfriend. Attractive women are busy being selective and trying to date the most attractive, richest, most popular guys… which means they’re way more likely to get used and dumped, because there’s no reason that guys like that should settle for one chick. All guys SOUND sincere when we’re trying to get laid. It’s just not true, though. Unattractive guys can promise the moon and the stars to attractive gals and get no dap. No light. Nada. After enough crashing & burning, guys start to want something real and lower their visual standards while raising their personality standards. This is where unattractive chicks clean up. :D

Unattractive women look the same in the morning………

I wouldn’t be surprised if unattractive chicks have more kids on average, being that their boyfriends/husbands aren’t worried about potentially messing up her stellar physique. Dunno. \o/

Anyway… You can see the myriad advantages that unattractive women have when it comes to relationships. Attractive women can get INTO relationships easier, but unattractive women can REMAIN in relationships easier because they were probably selected for qualities that are going to LAST throughout the years. Keep that in mind next time you see a DUFF chillin’ at the bar, smiling because she’s consistently looking like a HERO for being cool, funny, interesting & caring towards dudes that her attractive homegirl just finished haughtily rejecting.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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Ladies… If you really want to learn about your man’s personality, hang around him when he’s playing video games.

All of y’all that are dating gamers know I’m telling the truth.

The way he plays his games is the exact same way he’s going to interact with YOU….. um… assuming that he cares as much about YOU as he does his VIDEO GAMES….. which isn’t likely.

What game are we playing, anyway?

I don’t know much about dudes that play Mario Bash Bash or Dance Dance Revolution or whatever cutesy, corny games they make these days. I know about FPS. First Person Shooters. War Simulations. They’re still called “games” because Atari was a game. You had a little cutesy tank and would shoot a little square at the other cutesy tank and try to hit it more times than it hit you.

Technology has improved to the point that these so-called “games” are now being utilized as preparations for actual war.

I found this out from watching my friend Baratunde Thurston‘s show Popular Science’s “Future Of…”.

One of the episodes is about the future of Combat, and it’s rather enlightening…

Popular Science: The Future of the Military — Perhaps

Drones have become common battlefield tools in the past decade but are typically controlled at the company or battalion level, which respectively have about 135 and 650 soldiers apiece. FCS wants tools like the UAV at the platoon (approximately 40 soldiers) and even squad (10 members) level. The vision is also to expand the range of applications. The Massachusetts-based company iRobot manufactures a PackBot currently deployed overseas, which the military uses primarily to scout for improvised explosive devices, while the SUGV, also made by iRobot, may one day lead infantry assaults like the one I witnessed. A single soldier can comfortably tote a SUGV, and the controller, copied almost directly from that of an Xbox game console, was designed to be intuitively easy for a young recruit to use.

Look Familiar?: The controls for FCS unmanned
vehicles are modeled after those used for video
game consoles
Photo Credit: Brent Humphreys

One of the soldiers handed me the controller; I donned the head-up display and started driving. The robot crashed into a wall. After practicing for a few minutes, I was able to steer into one of the buildings and scan for insurgents. There was something exciting — and faintly disturbing — about the notion that I could help battle insurgents with technology that felt only slightly elevated from the R/C cars of my childhood. But I wasn’t totally sold. Removing the display, I asked what would prevent an enemy from shooting the SUGV as soon as he spotted it. “Nothing,” replied one of the soldiers nearby, Lt.-Col. Ed House. “But if he does, we know he’s there, so the SUGV has accomplished its mission. Better to shoot a robot than a soldier.”

So.. Laugh all you want while people call our war simulations “games”, but that’s not what’s actually going on.

Dominance

One of the things that a lot of women can’t grasp is why guys do the confrontational things we do. We fight. We go to war. We remain in the rat race when we’re already rich and have more money than we’re ever going to spend during whatever’s left of our lives…..

This is because we’re built to prove that we’re better than the next man.

This is why we cheer for our home team.

New York is better than Philadelphia on this day in Football. Montreal is better than California on this day in Baseball. Our country beat the living **** out of your country in a war, so we get to tell you what to do and/or steal all of your oil.

This is our lives. This is what matters. This is what moves us. This is what we’re passionate about.

THIS is what’s going on when we’re online playing video “games”. YOU stepped to ME on an equal battlefield where you had the same opportunity to select guns and power-ups as I did and I *WAXED* you!… SIT. THE. ****. DOWN! :D That’s what it’s all about. Proving minute after minute that you’re better than someone else. If you don’t understand how good that feels, you’ll never understand hardcore gamers.

I’ve personally (thanks to my teammates and other people I’ve made alliances with via gaming) been #1 in the world in a game that took two months to play. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I was BY FAR the #1 base capturer, planet-wide. There were players from the USA, Japan, England, France and a few other scattered countries that were represented in the game. Also, the guy I left in the dust at #2, I happen to know he was cheating, because I know him and played with AND against him.

That’s the flag I planted. I planted it for myself. I planted it for my team. I planted it for my country. It’s in the books. It’s a done deal. You can NOT take that away from me, EV*A*R. This is what we do. We represent ourselves. We represent our friends. People talk about us in languages we don’t even understand, because they respect our skills and the dignity with which we carry ourselves whether we win or lose. If you’ve never felt this, I can’t explain to you how important it is or how good it feels. If you’ve never gone into matches where people wrote you off because they’ve never heard of you and then you defeat a team that everyone agrees is one of the tightest squads playing the game today and then people STILL don’t want to give you your propers.. I can’t explain how that feels to you. If you’ve never beaten up A SECOND HERALDED TEAM in the same tournament and the peons don’t want to give you your props, but both of the teams you beat have respect for you (and you for them) that’s lasted to this very day… I can’t explain to you how that feels. :)

Dating

What does this have to do with dating? :D Well… Before that day we got drunk and went out to the club and you were looking good and we decided to kick it to you because you were HAWT and turning us on… We were gaming with our homeboys.

Before you got added to the roster, we already had a bunch of IRL friends and online friends. You’re going to have to make your way up the ladder. You don’t get instant props because you’re the “girlfriend”. Going to your moms’s house for Sunday dinner isn’t high up on our list of things to do.

Sitting around on a bench with the other henpecked boyfriends at the mall while you shop for duplicate pairs of black shoes that you don’t even need to waste your money on isn’t high up on our list of things to do. That chick-flick you rented on DVD might never see the inside of our XBOX or Playstation3, ya dig? :D

At the same time that you’re at a decided disadvantage if you date a gamer, you also have an unique opportunity to be around him when he’s being REAL. You’d be surprised that some of the most calm, intelligent, cerebral dudes will be screaming and cursing at the top of their lungs when people mess up and do the wrong thing or the game jerks them. huh Some friends of mine didn’t know who I am and challenged me to one-on-one games of HALO. I hadn’t even PLAYED HALO in months, but thank God my skillz came online after about 10 minutes and I pistoled and sniper-rifled them to death so many times that both of the top dogs at the party quit and didn’t want to play anymore. I would have been severely embarrassed and depressed, had I lost to them, considering that my boy Mak and I used to whip ass on the guy that won the first HALO tournament and his crew DAILY before he won and received his MLG contract (meaning we never saw him again, or else we’d STILL be whipping his ass to this day). I tried to lighten the party’s atmosphere by informing the guys I beat that there was no way they should have beaten me anyway, because I’m a World-Class FPS gamer, but they were still shell-shocked haha :D

It’s easy for a guy to be cool, friendly & gentlemanly around you when you’re out on a date because nothing important’s happening. Yeah, he’s trying to convince you to give him some, but that’s really a reflection on YOU. When he’s gaming, it’s a reflection on HIM and his self-esteem and self-perception. Dating is basically wasting time waiting for the chick to give it up. It’s a bunch of downtime until you get to the nitty-gritty. When you’re the last guy (as usual) left on your team and it’s up to you to defeat three or four other players and accomplish your objective, that’s when every split second counts and life gets REAL.

If you have the opportunity to be around your SO when he’s in this zone, you’ll see who he really is. You’ll see what matters to him.. what makes his heart pump faster. Ask him to take out the trash now, and you might get a response you didn’t expect. Ask him if he loves you now, and he might ignore you completely. He probably didn’t actually even HEAR YOU because he’s so immersed in the game. Tell him you’re ready to go to church, and maybe he’ll quit the game to drive you there… maybe he’ll put the controller down so he can see you to the door and lock you out… maybe he’ll ignore you completely… maybe he’ll split the difference and without looking up from his game, say “PAYCE!!!… Don’t let the door HIT’cha where the Good Lord SPLIT’cha! :D”

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack/@DatingGenius

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