There is no way to escape who you are, as you can only make efforts to change how you behave. Our formative years and past experiences are always there and the behaviors we learned come back quickly and naturally.
Yesterday morning when I went for coffee there was a new girl in the office, she was blonde and a solid 6. We made good eye contact, and when I went to fill up my cup she inquired about the unusual design. The answer to her question was, “No”, and that should have been the end of the conversation about the cup. Of course my old, helpful Gamma past came up and I had to give two sentences about why the answer is “No”. It wasn’t needed and I could see in her eye she wasn’t interested in knowing about the cup, but rather was just making small talk.
When I sat down at my desk, I just laughed at myself about it. I’m happily married with a family with no designs on the girl; I have no fear of women, and don’t take shit from them. But there it was like a bad penny showing up, my old Gamma “Me have information, me useful to you!” inclination hiding in the bushes and just dying to get out.
So two lessons here: First is, you can’t escape your past completely and it will be a recurring battle, and second, when you lose a minor skirmish with your past, don't beat yourself up over it, just laugh it off, learn from it, and vow to do better next time.
Vox adds: This is true no matter what sociosexual status you happen to have. Reprogramming our instinctive reactions is considerably more difficult than reprogramming our intentional behavior. The trick is to restrain the former in order to control the situation with the latter, assuming the latter is to be preferred.
~ archived since 2018 ~
