The other day I told a girl something that I think is quite relevant to you. We were on the beach learning how to do handstands, or rather I was teaching her. Not that I know, but I was certainly better than her. Sometimes when we tell each other things, we do so in order to understand ourselves and our own situations better. So what was happening was that when she was doing handstands, (and try to stay with me here), her feet would fall forward and she would land in a “downward dog” position, as the yogis call it. But when I tried to do a handstand, I would last quite a bit longer on average, and then I would usually fall onto my back, which hurt a little bit. In fact, I have a slight headache from having the wind knocked out of me several times. But what’s important is that I was better at doing handstands because I was constantly pushing towards what my fourth grade baseball coach would call a “swinging strike”, whereas she was just watching the ball go straight over the plate. You only learn the limit of where you flop over onto your back by going over it. Repeatedly. Otherwise you just keep kicking your legs up and down like a retard, and you never learn where that sweet spot is, because you’ve never been to the other side of it.
Well, this girl never figured it out, but we had a good time trying. I held her legs up a few times, which made for some funny situations—her kicking me in the face, trying to crawl away, me not catching her when I said I would—but even more important was that my whole philosophy about headstands came to a head when she said she was dizzy and fell down in the sand. “Look at the moon,” she said. “Look at the stars. Look at the clouds” untill we’d exhausted the sky. Long before, we had exhausted discussing the circumstances that fated our meeting on this beach. And the distant, Freudian past is not polite to bring up upon first meeting. So what now? Does the silence mean the connection we built doing handstands is falling apart? There are two ways to see it. First, yes: it is falling apart. Abort mission, go home, land on your feet. The second: kiss her. And when she looks at you surprised, trying to figure out what to say and think, kiss her the fuck again.
Maybe you think you have been taught a certain type of manners in love, and maybe this philosophy strikes you as a bit rapey, but think about it. Either you kiss her and find out for sure whether she likes you or whether she don’t; worst case scenario: she is a total bitch, and she goes crazy and starts screaming “creep, rapist” because you took that liberty, and then some giant, handsome dude appears and smashes your head in with a rock; Then of course he fucks the girl right then and there, and they desecrate your body. Unlikely, but lesson learned.
More likely, kissing her will bring the subtext to the foreground, and you will have solid indication of what worked in your game and what didn’t for your records. Remember, consistent feedback is the most powerful resource for improving nearly any skill. Think of the slight embarrassment—getting the wind knocked out of you on a “backwards fail” handstand—as feedback. Let yourself be Pavlov’s dog. The forwards fail is nothing. A waste of time as far as I’m concerned.