Cartaphilus - HOW to Meet Women - The Shy Mans Guide to Relationships | Page 2

1: Compose a 1000-word or longer essay, titled "Who I Am". Tell all about yourself, your
interests and your goals, your passions, your hidden desires, your joys and your hurts, your strengths
and your weaknesses, your sources of pride and what you are ashamed of. Essentially, you will be
describing what you have to offer to the woman who will love you (for you can't come into a
relationship empty-handed).
Exercise 2: Write a rather detailed autobiography. Recall as many as you can of the formative
influences and people in your life. Remember your achievements and failures, your moments of
triumph, and the depths of your pain and despair. Call it "How I Got Here".
Exercise 3: Write a short description of the woman you would like to meet, the one who haunts your
dreams, the soulmate who will enter your life one day. Paint a "word picture" of her. What is she like?
Is there anything particularly striking about her appearance? Describe her personality. What special
appeal does she hold for you? Why will she be attracted to you in particular?


These three essays will form the introduction, the frontispiece and anchor to your journal, the tale of

3 your journey. Should you lose your way, this is your compass, your guide back to the path you will
follow. Here is your first gift to yourself, a sense of direction.
"We are all of us poets and storytellers, making literature of our lives..."
Kelly Cherry

Realizations
Having a girlfriend will not solve any problems - it will tend to worsen them, if anything. Bonding with
a woman will add to the tension and pressure already on you. You need to fix up your life and your
Self to be worthy of a meaningful relationship, to be able to uphold your end of it. Learn to be
comfortable with yourself, to use your aloneness creatively, to transform lonely into self-sufficient.
The less you need others, the more they will be attracted to you.
Gain social skills. Communicate with people. Learn how to talk. Becoming at ease in conversation
makes it easier to make friends and relate to them. Empathize with and help those around you.
Partake of their joys and griefs, their accomplishments and failures. Grow, and share your own
experiences with them.
Build on your existing social connections - family, friends, and colleagues at work. Even business
relationships of the most impersonal sort help establish your place in the scheme of things and
reinforce your inner sense of connectedness. You must break out of your isolation, emerge from your
cocoon before you can even entertain the notion of a romantic relationship.
Become a "collector" of people. Enlarge your social circle. This means reaching out to strangers,
saying hello to persons unknown, and in general, meeting people and acquiring casual friends and
acquaintances. Making new contacts is sometimes difficult and always a little scary, but it pays off in
the long run - you never know who will introduce you to your next girlfriend. This is called
networking.
Recreate yourself as a more interesting person. Keep up with current events. Read books. Continue
your education. Pursue hobbies and interests, cultivate skills. Become proficient in some endeavor,
some field. Being looked up to as an expert will gain you respect and admiration. Help others and
teach them.
Evolve and develop into a strong, independent individual. Become a helper, a resource. Give support
and encouragement to those that need it. Be a pillar of strength to those weaker than you. Volunteer
your services to groups that help others. Let the goodness in your heart shine as a beacon to those
around you. Know that what you get from life is a return on what you give.

Lonely men seek companionship. Lonely women sit at home and wait. They never meet.

If some of the advice presented appears counterintuitive, it is because shyness bears its own
imperatives, and this necessitates viewing "the rules of engagement" of the dating game from an

4 unusual perspective, through the distorting lens of an outsider. You are already aware that you cannot
compete with your more socially adept peers on their own terms, and it follows that extraordinary
efforts are required... to even out the playing field and give you at least a fighting chance.
Every technique described from here forward is but a codification of what the socially adept do
instinctively. So can you too master these modes of behavior by understanding and practicing them to
the point where socializing becomes as natural as breathing.

I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I'm frightened of the old ones.
John