The Dating Gods

A bunch of men exist who know exactly how to 'level up' with women. These are the guys who have the instinctive ability to find, bed and wed the most desirable females at will. They don't need to even think about it.

We meet these dudes in high school. They're the ones who always had a girlfriend, and kept her with their smile alone. They're also the guys who had sex with their girlfriends, effortlessly, and, given their confidence, more competently than men double their age. They're the guys who just knew shit about girls, and apparently always did, as if they'd been kissed on the dick by a fairy at birth.

You know the type, right? Guys like this were a step above and beyond mere journeyman women-lovers like me. Even at this distance, I could name them all from my Year 12 class. I can see them now, flirting with their many female admirers, making it look easy. How could they keep that group of seventeen-year-old-hormone-addled schoolgirls rapt for the entire lunch-hour? It just wasn't fair.

Ahem.

At a guess, they make up somewhere south of 5% of the male population. And they're not all handsome, sporty types, either. Sometimes they are simply good communicators, or they're funny, or skilled at operating in groups. Oftentimes they look to be working effortlessly, because although they care, they never look like they care. It's a form of magic.

I chose my metaphor about 'leveling up' carefully. Especially in high school, the precise status of the relationship you have with your girlfriend is calibrated in very fine increments. Just where you are on the road to hands-in-her-pants or bare breastedness is measured zipper-tooth by bra-hook. This might be because all of this is general knowledge - after all, what's the point of finally getting your finger wet if no-one in the school quadrangle knows about it? High-school dating is nothing if not a group ritual.

'Leveling up' is from the gaming world, of course, the other obsession of teenaged boys. The irony is that those nerd-types who can easily level-up in video world demonstrate inversely proportional skills in a real life world filled with females. The nerdy types might know all the hacks to reach the ultimate game level, but the 5 percenters know all the hacks to get to the ultimate girl level.

So here we are, years later, and I still see the 5 percenters getting all the babes. Some of them turned out to be gay, for sure. Others kept leveling up, and, unable to settle, are still measuring their lives by numbers of ladies bedded. But I think most of them married (good lookers) and had all the same difficulties in life as everyone else. Still and all, they have that effortlessness that most of us will forever envy, even if they are totally unaware of it.


Bottoms Up, All-Knowing Ones.