Cartaphilus - HOW to Meet Women - The Shy Mans Guide to Relationships

HOW-2 Meet Women
The Shy Man's Guide to Relationships
by
Cartaphilus
© 1999 by M\Cooper
All rights reserved
Introduction

This is for all you shy and lonely guys out there. It's painful enough being alone, but seeing "everyone
else" laughing and having a good time with wives and girlfriends, how easy it is to despair of ever
gaining these pleasures, to resign yourself to being tortured forever by loneliness, to slip into
hopelessness. To give up.
No! You hold in your own hands the power to change your life. If only you could turn the same talent
and experience that have brought you success in other pursuits to the challenge of finding, meeting,
and creating a relationship with a love mate, what wonders might you yet accomplish? For so many
desperate and empty years you have struggled to find a companion, something that seems to come
naturally to so many other men, yet you have choked on ashes and bitterness. Nonetheless, it is your
very failures that make you worthy of love. You will succeed, you will relate in a rare and meaningful
way to a woman, and to a depth that will forever be denied those to whom love comes too easily and
who therefore take it for granted. You have remained true to the romantic ideal and have escaped the
fate of those cynical burnouts that you envy in moments of weakness. Unlike the professional Romeos,
those manipulators and skillful predators who attract women effortlessly, you see a love relationship
as the singularly precious thing it is. How very fortunate will be the woman who wins your heart.
To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.
Bertrand Russell
First Steps
Hard work and pain lie ahead. This journey of self-discovery and transformation demands all the
courage and determination you can muster. Grit your teeth, for there is much learning to be done, and
many mountains loom in the distance. Fortunately you need climb only one at a time.
Each painful lesson will leave you, if bloodied, ever more determined to press onward. As hard steel is
tempered by heating, then quenching in cold water, so too will your character be strengthened by the
hardships you surmount. Growing hurts.
If there is a purpose to life's cruelties and tragedies, it is to make of you a better person. It can be
likened to stripping the faded and peeling paint from an antique piece of fine cabinetry to reveal the
magnificence of the natural wood grain underneath. This lends credence to the assertion that the only
truly strong and quality people are those that have been fire-hardened and polished by adversity.
You will practice patience. You will be patient with yourself. You will be patient with the people you
relate with. You will trust that all will work out for the best, and not force matters along.
Relationships progress at their own pace, and it is ofttimes a slow one.

2 You will never, never give up.
Learning From Experience
Life is about making mistakes and collecting bruises, learning from them, becoming transformed by
them. There is something universal about making a fool of yourself, falling on your face, being
rejected
by a woman. It has happened to you. It may well happen again. It happens to everyone.
Who will tell whether one happy moment of love, or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright
morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies?
Erich Fromm
Admit your mistakes. There's no place to hide from them, but don't take them personally. They need
not shatter your self-confidence. Be strong (the pain will recede). Stand back and analyze what
happened. Take notes. Record your experiences, tell your story. Keep a journal. It will help you pull
together the scattered fragments of your life and piece together the deeper meaning of it.

Recognize the dangers of overcorrecting for your aloneness, of prematurely throwing yourself into the
"social whirl" to break out of your isolation. You need stability and continuity in your life, and be
wary of disrupting familiar routine, lacking adequate preparation. Changing your life is a major
undertaking, and it will take time.

Defining Yourself
Before proceeding farther, it is time to define your own individual identity, to get a firm grasp on who
and what you are, to figure out what differentiates you from all the other humans running around in
the wide world. This is hard work, and will require a considerable investment in time and effort... and
thought.


Exercise