I have a friend of mine who I've known for about 8 years, we've been roommates a couple different times. I consider him a good friend, we've helped each other with many real-life issues on many different occasions. He is the first real drinking buddy I've had my adult life and we have had a lot of fun since we've known each other.

Socially though he can get a bit weird sometimes, and its always bugged me. He is what some on here would consider an AMOG, he is 6'3" and a scrapper, I am 5'6" and generally have been an introverted, passive person most of my adult life (working on it).

There is a specific instance a long time ago, I was 21 at the time and we were at a college bar. He egged me on to go dance with the hottest girl on the dance floor, and I was a drunken newbie so I went for it. I got her to turn around and I did this ridiculous hand wave that was the corniest possible body language, and she immediately eye-rolled and turned back around. It was the most epic, disastrous crash and burn I've experienced, a pure concentrated dose of social rejection. To him it was the funniest thing he had ever seen, and to this day 7+ years later he still brings it up sometimes as a joke.

This was a pretty traumatic experience for me, it destroyed my social self-esteem for years afterward. I would just cringe every time he brought it up, as it was like he could summon instant embarrassment for me in any social situation by using it. I always figured my own social awkwardness was to blame for it and that I should just accept that I was odd and move on with other parts of my life.

I have known him long enough to notice some things, he is always looking around at people pointing out their flaws or oddities, things that I am completely oblivious to until he points it out. I tend to not notice or care all that much about what everyone around me is doing or saying.

So I have put a lot of focus in the past couple weeks of building my inner game through body language and sheer force of will.

Today we go to lunch and I am projecting far more confidence than usual by just forcing my body language, holding eye contact with the waitress, smiling, not creepily staring at women, being relaxed and i notice he is picking on me a lot more than usual. In the past, I've noticed increases in the level of ribbing he does and I figured it was just randomness.

Now I am starting to think it is something else. Do you think he is perceiving the increase in confidence and is teasing me a lot more because he thinks I can handle it, or is this more of an underhanded way to maintain his social edge, coolest person at the table status. I legitimately want to believe there isn't a malicious subtext to it, but my intuition tells me there might be.

Do you think this is just a technique some people use, of negging everyone around them to boost their own confidence? Or do confident people just make fun of others for the hell of it because they can?

Do you guys find other men getting more aggressive toward you as your inner confidence level increases? Any shorter PUAs out there find themselves having to deal with insecure big guys trying to punk them with physical size? Or does it become less of a problem as you get better?