I obsess about getting better at pickup in my head. I’m addicted towards following girls on IG hoping they’ll follow back, like, etc. At parties, I always go up and talk to as many girls as possible looking to get good responses.

But being perfectly honest, I literally only care about getting attention/ validation from women, 100x more than I care about actually pulling or getting with them. It’s almost as if I talk myself out of it most of the time - because I get the validation/ good reaction I want and then I just greedily continue until they’re no longer interested.

This has been going on since before I can remember (middle school at least).

But dude. What the fuck is wrong with me? How fucked up do I have to be to not even care about getting with women and instead just getting quick-fleeting attention from them to validate myself?

I literally fail with girls repeatedly over and over for this reason, and yet I know everything I should be doing in ‘game’ yet never apply it. It feels like an addiction.

TLDR: I’ve realized/ come to terms with the fact that I’m addicted to getting temporary validation/ attention from women, without actually having any real desire to get with them. It almost feels like I purposely avoid/ sabotage myself at a certain point so that I don’t get the chance to be with them.

(I suffer from self esteem issues and grew up without a consistent father figure from the age of 12 onwards, am 19M in college now)