The knight and the rogue

During my first years of college, spent in a university seventy miles south of Montreal, I acquainted myself with a wide group of weirdos and misfits who helped me put the world into perspective. One of my most notable acquaintances was Marco*, one of my first roommates and a case in which the book didn’t match the cover. Possessing both Italian and Peruvian ancestry, Marco was 6 foot 4 and blessed with good looks. While he wasn’t a workout maniac, he frequently lifted weights and had a fit body – in fact, it was Marco who first turned me onto regular exercise and low-carb dieting. Basically, he looked like the sort of tall, dark and handsome bastard that would be featured on the cover of a Harlequin romance novel, with a title like “Seduced by the Sicilian Scoundrel” or something predictably dramatic. Upon meeting him, I assumed he was a bonafide natural, the sort of guy who had been swooping girls since junior high and would have long lines of women out our door begging for a taste of his Italian sausage.

Shortly after moving in, though, my expectations were shattered into a thousand pieces. Marco was not the slick player I thought he was, but an average dude who was in a monogamous relationship with a cute but not smashing girl. And as the year went on, Marco revealed his beta soul to me bit by bit. He confided to me that he had only lost his virginity at 17, the year before we met. Around Thanksgiving of that year, Marco and his girl got into a massive argument because he had wanted to celebrate their two-month anniversary and she ignored his phone calls to go partying with her friends. I knew nothing of what women wanted then, but I could figure out that the kind of guy who would want to celebrate a two-month relationship anniversary was the sort of chump who couldn’t get laid if the future of the species depended on it.

Marco’s girlfriend was the sort of hussy who masqueraded as a “good girl,” only to show her true face behind closed and locked doors. Watching Marco fail what I later realized were her shit tests over and over was unbelievably painful to watch. She was a serious alcoholic, frequently embarrassing and burdening the teetotaler Marco with her drunken episodes. The coup de grace was when I came home one Saturday night from a few hours of college revelry to find her splayed on my side of the bed, drunk, undressed, and drooling, and Marco wiping up a half-gallon of vomit from the corner of my rug and profusely apologizing to me. That incident killed what little respect I had for him. A man who can’t “keep [his] ho on a leash” is not a man at all. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find out that she was sucking other dudes’ dongs when Marco wasn’t looking.

As I moved through the college’s social circles, I became friends with Rich*, the scumbag to end all scumbags. While not hideous, he wasn’t particularly attractive, being of Irish and Polish ancestry, standing only 5 foot 8, and having a nose like a toucan’s beak. He was known for his extensive drug and alcohol abuse, frequently drove while drunk (and yet never managed to get a DWI), and even managed to blow a hole in his septum from snorting too much cocaine. In regards to his behavior, he was a friendly but surly asshole, the sort of guy who makes a reliable friend but is not “respectable.” But unlike the beta Marco, Rich did have a line of ladies looking to lick his dick on the weekends. He went through women like a flu sufferer goes through tissues.

Most notably, Rich treated the women who wanted him like absolute shit. At one point, he had managed to bring a virginal “good girl” who was on Marco’s girlfriend’s level of attractiveness into his orbit. She slaved for him like I had never seen before; doing his laundry, helping him with his classwork, cleaning his room, giving him blowjobs on command, and following him around like a puppy. Rich was openly contemptuous of her, banging other girls while he was with her (the wallpaper on his cell phone was of two of his other booty calls flashing their boobs), and when she confessed her love for him, he flat out told her he didn’t like her. Her response: “Could you try?” No matter how many times Rich kicked her in the head, she got up and begged for more.

Contrasting these two men and their experiences with women was a mindblowing realization for me. Here was an unattractive guy who behaved like Tucker Max on crystal meth and was rewarded for it with the willing pussies of girls of all stripes – and not just “low-quality” women, but “good girls.” Meanwhile, the muscled, well-groomed and physically attractive Marco struggled to keep his one girlfriend from dumping him out of disgust. As a guy who was average looking and had had average success with women up to that point, I sought answers – and I found them.